Print Launch: Hai-Wen Lin

Process/Process at Campfire Printing Press, 2415 W 19th St, 2-C 30 May 2026 
Overview
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Process/Process at Campfire Printing Press, 2415 W 19th St, 2-C Open to the public. No RSVP required. 5PM - 7PM

Hai-Wen Lin’s practice explores the attunement of the body to the environment through fashion, sculpture, and kitemaking. 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’s movements in print were enabled by the sensitivity of materials like silk and copper to the artist’s own hand: the mixed media work contains relief, intaglio, blind embossing, hand embellishment, beads, string, and photography. Attentive to the poetic dimensions of words and their translations, the artist references historic Chinese adornments, including the Pi Ling collar, Chao Zhu necklace, and the Bei Yun pendant. 

 

*Courtesy Museum of Arts and Design

 


Hai-Wen Lin is an artist living somewhere beneath the sky. Their work explores constructions of the body and the attunement of oneself to the environment, often moving through metaphor, etymology, sunlight, wind, and the way time passes perfectly when you are out walking on a beautiful day. Lin is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and received a M.Des in Fashion, Body and Garment from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They received the Museum of Art and Design's 2025 Burke Prize, are a 2025 Luminarts Visual Arts Fellow, a 2024 American Craft Council Emerging Artist, a 2023 CFDA Fashion Future Graduate, and a recipient of the Hopper Prize. Lin has been a artist-in-residence of MacDowell, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Lighthouse Works, Ox-Bow School of Art, and the Grand Canyon National Park, among many others. Lin has exhibited work at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, the walls of their home, their friend’s home, on a plate, on a lake, on their body, in the air.