[10][11] He counted among his influences the artists Daniel Buren, Dan Graham, and Franz West, the essayist Elaine Scarry and her work on culture in the body, and Taiwanese New Wave Cinema directors such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and Edward Yang.

[8][16] This initiated the role of the public in Lin's work, his concept of artist as host and audience as guest, and his approach of creating participatory artwork using everyday objects.

[7] He had chanced upon embroidered muslin pillowcases in his home, and recalled the traditional floral patterns from his youth in the countryside, where they would adorn the bedding given as part of a wedding dowry.

[6] With House (Bamboo Curtain Studio, 1998), Lin began working on an architectural scale, filling an entire wall of the exhibition space with a 45 square meter floral patterned mural.

[16][19] Untitled–Cigarette Break (IT Park, 1999) featured flower print paintings and a pair of Le Corbusier LC-2 chairs partially upholstered with the same patterns, as a critique of the relationship between art, design, and architecture, and the opposition of ornamentation with modernism.

For Imported (La Ferme du Buisson, 1998), he replicated a scenario from his hometown daily life by installing tables and stools and offering hundreds of cigarettes and bottles of Taiwan Beer to visitors, framed by billboards for the brands.

He created a "social space" in the entrance hall of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, deploying a large-scale floor painting decorated with phoenix and peony motifs and furnished with cushions bearing the same pattern.

[10] That year he was commissioned by Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans to create a site-specific installation and floor painting for the café lounge at Palais de Tokyo.

[8][20][29][30] Bourriaud and Sans invited Lin to the 2005 Biennale de Lyon, where he covered La Sucrière in a 100 square meter mural of an enlarged wallpaper pattern.

[6][9] At Kunsthalle Wien in 2005, Lin covered the windows with decorative patterns but left the gallery space empty, transforming the glass pavilion into an enormous oriental lamp.

Concurrent to the exhibition, Lin wrapped thousands of books at the Eslite Bookstore in Taipei in pink paper bearing phoenix and peony motifs, in a work titled "21.2.1972" after Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China.

[14][39][40] He collaborated with the architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow and video artist Cheng Ran on Model Home: A Proposition by Michael Lin (Rockbund Art Museum, 2012).

[13][60] The following year, Lin collaborated with Swiss visual artist Beat Streuli on the architectural and curatorial project Opening (Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, 2018) and the exhibition One Plus One (Eslite Gallery, 2018).

[13] At the same time, the Centre for Heritage, Art and Textile (CHAT) in Hong Kong commissioned a site-specific work, a set of large curtains for their lounge.

[4] In 2008, Lin contributed a floral mosaic flooring to the Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion, a portable exhibition hall designed by Zaha Hadid which was shown in Tokyo and New York.

[12] His floral patterns, imitating embroideries that would typically adorn Taiwanese pillows, are inspired by the vicissitudes in the domestic and political climates of Taiwan felt by the artist when he returned to the region after many years abroad.

[10][34] This idiosyncratic artistic understanding is shown by many of his large-scale installation works, including Model Home: A Proposition by Michael Lin at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, and Grind at MoMA PS1 in New York.