2025 Burke Prize: Hai-Wen Lin

The 2025 winner of MAD's biannual Burke Prize, Hai-Wen Lin explores the attunement of the body to the environment through fashion, sculpture, and kite making. 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.