About

Ferris Lin (Ching Tien Lin) is a paint artist based in Tainan, Taiwan. From the outset of a career in design, the goal was to be a cross-disciplinary designer, in the belief that design is at heart a single language: one way of thinking, carried across media and industries — from printing and spatial paint art to product, packaging and brand; from animation, graphic design and digital media to mass production and audiovisual work. To some, such breadth may read as a lack of specialisation; the answer is to pursue each field to its limit, then bring them all together. That capacity for integration is what has made brand design the place I fit best.

Born into a family that ran a print-finishing factory for export goods, Lin grew up familiar with production processes and colour management, and has mixed countless colours — then learned to mix them all over again, by method, in the national-team training for painting and decorating. Years of observation and colour training mean Lin can hit a colour precisely.

Lin's professional training is in painting and decorating, begun under mentor Wang Chih-ping (王治平): national gold medallist in Painting & Decorating, and a member of Taiwan's national team at the WorldSkills Competition in Shizuoka, Japan. Paint remains the core medium of a practice that spans murals, faux finishes, painted objects and illustration.

A parallel body of work takes Chinese characters as its subject — hanzi posters and hanzi animation, shown at the Kaohsiung Chinese Character Festival (Formosa) — while Lin's graphic design was exhibited at the London Design Festival (Formosa100). In 2016 Lin founded Trylove Design, a Tainan studio for brand, packaging and product design.

Lin has taught paint art and coating design at Tainan University of Technology and the Ministry of Labor's Workforce Development Agency (Yun-Chia-Nan Branch) for more than seven years, and, alongside this practice, writes music and keeps a drawn record of everyday life.