Bio
Hai-Wen Lin is an artist from Elk Grove, California, currently working somewhere beneath the sky. Their work addresses autobiographical narrative and constructions of the body, often moving through metaphor, etymology, sunlight, wind, and the way time passes perfectly when you are out walking on a beautiful day in your favorite dress. 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. Recent solo exhibitions of their work have been held at the Museum of Art and Design (2026), Chinese American Museum of Chicago (2025), the Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practices (2025), and Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (2025). Lin is one half of medium-sized, a collaborative practice with the poet Margaret Wright. You can often find their work by looking up.
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. Listen closely. I am talking to myself and my histories, tuning the ear towards coincidence, the sound of something echoed, a pun where spoken, written, and object languages collide. I make kites that borrow the vocabularies of garments in an effort to offer the world redress, to make refuge for errant bodies. What would it mean to clothe the wind, to measure a body in constant transition? Fashion is a study of how we encounter the world. It is concerned with climates, boundaries, and edges—necklines, hems, closures—and how we move in and around them. Kiteflying is the forecasting of a wish; it is a gesture towards that which can be seen, but not yet reached. This is a practice of being present, of attention and gratitude, of being tethered to one another, to my ancestors, to the wind, to nature, to you. Thank you for finding me here. Thank you for noticing.
Links / Resources
observing, reading, listening, giving attention,