Richard Lin, with courtesy name as Musheng, self-titled as Dingshan and Rujie, is the direct descendant of Wufeng Lin family, one of the five major families in Taiwan. He was educated in Japanese primary school in Taipei as a child, later studied in Taipei Jianguo Middle School after the recovery of Taiwan. He went to Britain in 1952 and completed the pre-university course at Milfield Noble School. He then studied architecture at the London Polytechnic Institute. After 1957, he devoted himself to painting and was involved in teaching quite many times at the famous British Academy of Fine Arts and also held teaching positions at the Royal College of Art. In 2010, “One is Everything: Richard Lin's 50-Year Creation Exhibition” held by the Kaohsiung Museum of Art was his most complete retrospective exhibition held in a museum.

In the late 1950s, Richard Lin experienced a period of lyrical abstraction. In the 1960s and 1970s, during the development of extreme painting in the UK, he started to create the "White Series". He once said: "White is all colours." The "five colours blind the eye" in the "Tao Te Ching" is the best interpretation of the white space in his work. In Richard Lin's works, you can see the shadows of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu's philosophical thinking, Chinese ink paintings, and Chinese literati paintings. In the later years, he adapted pure materials to create, emphasising the concepts of rationality and geometry, which displays the expression of modernism. During this time he lived in a manor in Wales and lived a pleasant life with flowers and plants. Most of the paintings at this time were applied with geometric abstract methods and bird's-eye views to express natural landscape.

Richard Lin is recognised a master of minimalism. His works combine Western creative techniques and Eastern philosophical thoughts, constructs an orderly geometric relationship with concise colours and shapes. The pictures are clean and comfortable, with his entire universe and inner world, injecting different nutrients into traditional Chinese aesthetic spirit.