2025 Burke Prize Winner

Lin’s practice explores the attunement of the body to the environment through fashion, sculpture, and kite making. Their works—described as “couture for the wind”—merge garment construction with flight engineering, resulting in textiles and sculptural kites that can be both worn and flown. Dyeing fabrics with sunlight and designing kites that double as garments, the Chicago-based artist collapses boundaries between art, design, and performance through poetic encounters with the elements. From a distance, Lin’s kites soar high above the earth; up close, they reveal delicate details like ceramic beads, feathers, rust dyes, and hand-dyed rope, creating work that is both deeply intimate and cosmically expansive. 

Lin is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and received a Master of Design in Fashion, Body and Garment from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are a 2025 Luminarts Visual Arts Fellow, a 2024 American Craft Council Emerging Artist, a 2023 CFDA Fashion Future Graduate, and a winner of the Hopper Prize. They have been an artist in residence at MacDowell, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Lighthouse Works, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Ox-Bow School of Art, and the Grand Canyon National Park, among others. Their work has been featured in publications such as Hyperallergic, American Craft, SZ Magazin, and the Chicago Reader. Recent solo exhibitions include the Centre for Cultural & Artistic Practices (2025), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2025), FACILITY (2024), and Prairie (2023). Lin has also exhibited at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, the Wassaic Project, Hyde Park Art Center, the Pittsburgh Glass Center, the walls of their home, their friend’s home, on a lake, on their body, and in the air. You can often find their work by looking up. 

Hai-Wen Lin lives in Chicago, Illinois. A dedicated exhibition of Lin’s work will be on view at MAD in 2026.