Spring resident artist Hai-Wen Lin presents about their sculpture and installation work across a 45-minute slideshow of images, followed by audience questions. This presentation is hosted by Frederico Câmara (Assistant Professor of Art, Photography) and Martha Poggioli (Professor of Practice, Interdisciplinary Art and Curation, and Pollock Gallery Director) and concludes Hai-Wen’s campus studio visits with MFA students of SMU Meadows School of the Arts. Happy Hour follows across the street on the patio at Los Charros: 6101 Hillcrest Ave, Dallas.

HAI-WEN LIN

Sculpture, Installation  -  Chicago, Illinois

Hai-Wen Lin is an artist living somewhere beneath the sky. Their work explores constructions of their 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, 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. Recent accolades include the Museum of Art and Design’s 2025 Burke Prize, the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation’s 2025 Visual Arts Award, and a 2025 Luminarts Visual Arts Fellowship. Lin has been an 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. They have offered workshops in partnership with the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, the Mint Museum, the Heritage Museum of Asian Art, and the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology. 

This is a practice that walks the motions of daily life and invites the company of naturally occurring phenomena. It is an attempt to attune one’s body to the environment, to unsettle static markers of identity and offer instead the wind, sun, and sky as relational anchors to gather and situate oneself. Hai-Wen Lin works through the language of fashion as a sculptural approach to kitemaking in an effort to free, fly, and extend their body.

In Corsicana, Hai-Wen intends to continue work on their largest kite to date in preparation for an exhibition at the Knoxville Museum of Art in Fall 2026. They are interested in rituals of time, of listening, of tending to a single piece as if a garden. haiwenlin.com