Art Chowder September | October Issue No. 29 | Page 52

MURALIST
JIEMEI LIN
Jiemei Lin is hovering ten feet off the ground as she describes the large mural she’s
painting on the upper stories of a building in downtown Spokane.
When it’s completed in a few days’ time, the mural will be a rectangular, two-panel
scene that’s divided horizontally. The top half will feature a Chinese girl in goggles,
swimming in a public pool at night; the bottom half will broadly mirror that motif,
except it will show an American boy swimming during the day.
E.J. IANNELLI
SPOKANE ARTS
ARTS COMMISSIONER
Journalist, copywriter, editor
and translator with more than a
decade of experience spanning
three countries. Literature, music
and technology/gadgets are both
personal interests and professional
strengths.
The finished piece will measure 32 feet high by 16 feet across, which explains why
Lin is currently perched in the bucket of a rented cherry picker. The image itself is
a wall-sized adaptation of an untitled illustration that she created for a picture-book
series called Daniel and Ding.
“I’ve been making illustrations about the time difference between two kids who
live in both the U.S. and China,” she says. “They may not be real, but I made this
story up to understand the characters better. They have, like, a twelve-hour time
difference. And if you see them at the same time, they would do maybe the same
thing but in different ways.”
To Lin, this swimming pool scene perfectly captures the contrasts and the similarities
that link both sides of the world.
“There’s this really interesting fact that, in China, swimming pools are open at night
only. Because people are really afraid of getting tan and sunburned.
52 ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE