2025 Burke Prize: Hai-Wen Lin

Hai-Wen Lin's practice merges garment construction with flight engineering, creating textiles and sculptural kites that collapse boundaries between fashion, design, and performance.

Why go

Lin's work—described as "couture for the wind"—combines hand-dyed silks, ceramic beads, and rust dyes into kites that function as both wearable art and aerial sculpture, revealing intimate craft details at close range while soaring cosmically above.

What to expect

Kites made from silk, bamboo, hand-woven tassels, and jewelry chain, each approximately 53 × 40 inches, alongside garments and sculptures exploring the body's attunement to environment through poetic encounters with natural elements.

Things to know

• 2025 Burke Prize winner; unrestricted $50,000 award to artists under 45 working in the United States
• Alumnus of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and School of the Art Institute of Chicago
• 2025 Luminarts Visual Arts Fellow and 2024 American Craft Council Emerging Artist
• Recent solo exhibitions at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2025) and Centre for Cultural & Artistic Practices (2025)
• Work featured in Hyperallergic, American Craft, and Chicago Reader
• Artist in residence at MacDowell, Bemis Center, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and Grand Canyon National Park

Plan your visit

Museum hours 12–8 pm daily. Become a member for free admission. Tickets available online.