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A thin Taiwanese femme with bleached blonde hair and black winged eyeliner sits on their fire escape surrounded by basil leaves in their garden.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

Artists

Yo-Yo Lin

She // Her // Hers
They // Them // Theirs

Artist

Brooklyn, New York

With my community, I dream and steward spaces for radical pleasure, asking ourselves, How can we be together? Building physical, digital, virtual, ancestral pathways to each other again and again.”
Yo-Yo Lin (林友友) is a Taiwanese-American interdisciplinary artist who explores the possibilities for self-knowledge in the context of emerging, embodied technologies. She often uses animation, live performance, and lush sound design to create meditative “memoryscapes.” Her recent body of work reveals and re-values the complex realities of living with invisibilized chronic illness, investigating ideologies of healing, resilience, and care. Refusing the Western medicalization of the crip body, she works towards a “soft data” archive that holds space for illness in its wholeness. Her practice often facilitates sites for community-centered abundance, developing into physical and virtual installations, workshops, accessible nightlife parties, and artist collectives.

Lin was a 2019 artist-in-residence at Eyebeam and a 2020 Open Call recipient for the Shed, and she teaches at NYU Tisch ITP/IMA as the 2021 Red Burns fellow. Her work has been featured in NOWNESS, Art in America, and Surface. She is the cofounder of ROTATIONS, a collaborative movement practice working towards deepening understanding of artistry, disability, and access.

Currently, Lin is studying tai chi and traditional Chinese medicine practices. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she now lives with her partner and growing collection of houseplants in Brooklyn.

Donor -This USA Fellowship was generously supported by Mellon Foundation. Disability Futures is supported by Ford Foundation and Mellon Foundation.

This artist page was last updated on: 08.20.2024

A thin ghostly figure sits in a cube made of translucent scrims. The room is dark except for the spectral orbs projected onto the screen, which glow an icy blue, dim orange, and unnatural green-yellow.

Channels. Multisensory performance exploring the intricate pathways of the body. By Yo-Yo Lin, Despina, and Pelenakeke Brown.

Photo courtesy of The Shed.

A digital illustration with various elements floating on a black background. To the center left of the composition is a large digital rendering of a slender gray figure with medium-length hair standing with their arms held away from the sides of their body as if being scanned. We see the figure both from the front and from the side with dotted lines running the length of the bodies, rainbow colored heat thermals also overlap the two bodies. The body scans are surrounded by floating illustrations including hands, an X-ray of a spine with metal rods, and a small blue-green orb on a red background.

Re:collections / 再次·回顧 by Yo-Yo Lin.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

An open sketchbook. The left page is titled "March 2020" followed by handwritten text in graphite that fills the page in neat numbered lines. Some words are underlined in red or highlighted in yellow. On the right page is a circular chart divided into equal segments numbered one through thirty-one. Each segment is divided further into squares. Some are colored in. Above the chart, a key adds descriptors for the colors such as "getting care" and "past traumas."

A spread from The Resilience Journal by Yo-Yo Lin, March 2020.

Photo courtesy of the artist.