Helen Lin
2026 HEAR US Awardee
ITP Class of 2026
Helen Lin is a multidisciplinary artist born and raised in a first-generation Chinese-American immigrant family in Brooklyn, NY. Through labor-intensive stitching of physical and digital forms, she makes art with and for people who work with their hands, celebrating the importance and craft of maintenance.
Project
to touch is to feel
Long before digital computers, feminized textile practices such as weaving and crochet used grids, patterns, and binary logic to encode information. Craft is positioned as a technological ancestor and an alternative to extractive, corporate systems. The project examines how textiles function as carriers of memory, linking hand labor to computation and archiving. By connecting textiles and electronics—two materials notoriously difficult to recycle—with the themes of touch, this project encourages us to reconnect with the tangible, affirming that technology’s origins are rooted in human craft and care.
“to touch is to feel (lineage in loops)” is a research-driven project that traces Chinese diasporic labor histories in New York through textile-based storytelling and interactive media. The work is rooted Lin's upbringing in a working-class Chinese-American family in Brooklyn and in the experiences of her mother and aunt, who worked in Sunset Park garment factories after immigrating.
This project’s completion consists of a public exhibition documenting personal histories of Asian diaspora and immigration through soft, touch-based forms. Drawing from physical and digital archives, oral histories, and community interviews, Lin will translate stories of labor across generations into textile book sculptures. The work centers on the garment industries that shaped immigrant life in the 1990s, honoring feminized, repetitive, and care-based work, which remains structurally invisible despite sustaining families, neighborhoods, and the city itself.
