2025 Burke Prize: Hai Wen Lin

The 2025 winner of MAD's biannual Burke Prize, Hai-Wen Lin 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. 

About the artist

Hai-Wen 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. 

About the Burke Prize

One of the most prestigious awards in the world of contemporary craft, MAD’s biannual Burke Prize awards an unrestricted $50,000 to an artist under the age of 45 working in the United States whose practice demonstrates conceptual rigor, relevance, and a mastery of materials and process. Named for Marian and Russell Burke, passionate collectors of craft and longtime supporters of MAD, the prize reinforces the Museum of Arts and Design’s commitment to celebrating the next generation of artists advancing the disciplines that shaped the American studio craft movement.

The winner and four finalists are selected from an open-call process by a distinguished jury of curators, artists, and scholars, including past Burke Prize winners. One Burke Prize artist also is chosen for the Burke Residency at The Studio of The Corning Museum of Glass, a one- to five-week residency with full benefits of Corning’s Artist-in-Residence program.