Bio
Hai-Wen Lin is an artist from Elk Grove, California, currently working somewhere beneath the sky. Through practices of kitemaking and garment construction, their work addresses, undresses, and redresses the wind, their body, and the world around it. Lin is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, received a M.Des in Fashion, Body and Garment from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA from the University of California, Davis. They are a recipient of the Museum of Art and Design’s Burke Prize, the Ellis-Beauregard Visual Arts Award, and a Luminarts Visual Arts Fellow. Lin has been an artist-in-residence at MacDowell, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Lighthouse Works, Ox-Bow School of Art, the Grand Canyon National Park, among many others. They were distinguished as one of Chicago’s 2026 Breakout Artists in NewCity Magazine and have had their work featured in Hyperallergic, American Craft, and Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin. Solo presentations of their work include the Knoxville Museum of Art (2026), the Museum of Art and Design (2026), the Chinese American Museum of Chicago (2025), and Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (2025).
Lin is one half of medium-sized, a collaborative practice with the poet Margaret Wright.
Friends
in collaboration, in admiration
Artist Statement
This is a practice that walks the motions of daily life and invites the company of naturally occurring phenomena. It is a study of how things are worn (upon a body) and how things are worn (eroded by time). It is an act of reorienting: upward, backward, wayward. I trade notes between myself and my histories, tuning the ear towards coincidence—the sound of something echoed—where spoken, written, and object languages collide. These are rituals for the peripatetic and the transvestic. I dress the world as I encounter it and let it dress me in exchange. I make kites that borrow the vocabulary of garments in an effort to clothe wind, to care for bodies invisible and errant. Kiteflying is the forecasting of a wish; it is a gesture towards that which can be felt, but not yet reached. This is a practice of being present, of attention and gratitude, of being tethered to one another, to the wind, to nature, to you. Thank you for finding me here. Thank you for noticing.
Links / Resources
observing, reading, listening, giving attention,