The Other Side Of Mountains
Le Lin

Chineseness. 

History in Chinese textbooks is often presented as a homogenous narrative, culture standardized and smoothed of its complexities. Migration, displacement, and the act of remembering become counter-histories to official narratives. Stories told within families, memories carried across borders, and cultural practices adapted to new environments all challenge the singular image of “Chineseness.” Instead, they reveal a layered landscape of belonging.

Landscapes. 

Landscapes are never neutral: they carry the weight of history, the persistence of cultural identity, and the traces of migration. Landscapes are charged sites—geographies shaped by memory, belonging, and power. Every plateau, mountain, and river bears the imprint of those who have traversed them, cultivated them, or been displaced from them, and they hold within them the contours of lived histories.

The Other Side of Mountains

The Other Side of Mountains is a series of imaginative landscapes by the diasporas of China’s ethnic minorities, focusing on the nostalgia, lived experiences, and the geopolitical climates of those regions. Throughout this past year, I invited members of the diaspora from Mongolia, Tibet, and Yunnan, to share their family’s stories, forgotten memories, and processes of migration. Using a mixture of different print-making techniques at Atelier Circulaire, this project culminated in a series of large prints (each print being a different printmaking technique). 

This exhibition project stems from a research and creation residency carried out at Atelier Circulaire during the 2024–2025 year, as part of the Louis-Pierre-Bougie Emerging Artists Grant, of which Le Lin is the recipient of the sixth edition.

Le Lin would like to thank the team at Atelier Circulaire as well as all the friends who contributed to the realization of this project.

林乐 Le Lin (pronouns 他 he/they) is a trans Teochew-Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, designer, activist, and researcher based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal, Quebec.
They love expanding and finding new ways to create art through book-making, typography, calligraphy, illustration, mixed media, and various printmaking techniques (silk-screen, risograph, letterpress, offset). Their work is oriented towards experiences of joy, empathy, and connection, and informed by thoughts and ideas that are authentic to their diasporic experience; these include gender, racialization, queerness,language, and identity. They are  a firm believer that art/designshould be tools of resistance, acts of vulnerability, and uplifting one another.