“Chinese cosmology sees the sky as round and the Earth as square, and with its four corners and circular neckline to wear the yunjian was to penetrate one’s body through the sky. Up there, peering through the neckhole, I wonder if I can see where all our wishes went to rest.” 

In Back to the Clouds, Hai-Wen Lin portrays a collar, bridled with string as if it were a kite.

Here is a key to reading this image: first we see a Qing Dynasty Pi Ling collar from behind, as evidenced by a dangling pendant that would have hung along one’s back if it were worn. In life the pendant would be heavy like a small weight, but here it is represented by clouds. If we see the collar as a kiteform, the pendant can also be interpreted as a reel.

In Back to the Clouds, Lin combines relief and intaglio printing and blind embossing with hand embellishments. Lin’s practice informed the print process from the beginning. They arrived at the studio with the things they use in their sculptural work: beads, silk, and string. With printer Angee Lennard, Lin explored elegant ways to print with such delicate materials. For example, a topography of beads on paper’s surface could be made with blind embossing, and together Lin and Lennard figured out how to create gentle visual textures with impressions from silk. They discovered that string can be pulled through tissue-like Okawara paper with a fine needle.

A composition of references, Back to the Clouds is a window into the artist’s practice. Lin has long been immersed in patternmaking and the hand construction of kites and collars, and they have more recently forayed into jewelry and metalsmithing. They are an adventurous forager of materials: a recent sculpture, bayin-ensemble (receiver), 2026, was made with metal, stone, silk, bamboo, gourd, clay, hide, and wood. The history of Chinese garments shapes much of their work as does their love of language in both a poetic and political sense.

To this end, the Pi Ling collar, which was printed from a shaped copper plate, is overlaid with blind embossment depicting the beads of a Chao Zhu necklace. The pendant that hangs from the collar is called a Bei Yun, which translates to “back cloud.” To both visualize and complicate this linguistic marker, the artist turned to the image of clouds themselves, printed as digital photographs, to serve as the counterweight.

If we look closely at the relief-printed striped border—in colors drawn from the Chinese Wuxing—we can see the subtle warp and weft of thin decorative Taiwanese silk. The deliberate border points to the artist’s broader use of bias tape to bind the edges of their kites. According to Lin, “When sewing fabric on the bias, you cut it on the diagonal, so that there's more flexibility and stretch, which allows for smooth finishes around curves. I've always been interested in the finishing of edges as a consideration in fashion and the edge as a boundary between one's body and the world.”

This print engages the artist’s sculptural impulse, but it also represents their drawing practice. In an exhibition at Prairie in 2023, Lin displayed “back divination” drawings, which the artist creates by making marks on paper stretched along their own back. A return to such drawings was the basis for the marks that animate this copper etching. In this case, however, it was the paper form of a collar that they draped around their neck before stretching their arm to make marks with their left hand. For Lin, this is “making sense of something you can't quite see, but can feel,” and the contours of the marks themselves reveal the limits of one’s own body.

Back to the Clouds is Hai-Wen Lin’s first published print.