Yshao Lin
Bio: Yshao Lin (Fuzhou, China) works across photography, artist books, sculpture, and installation. Drawing on personal history and collective experience, his practice explores displacement and the ways migration reshapes identity, memory, intimacy, and belonging. Rooted in family narratives and broader social histories, his work examines how home is carried across distance through images, objects, and emotional memory. He holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been recognized with GUP’s Fresh Eyes Photography Award, Photoworks UK’s Graduate Issue, the Flash Forward Award, and the New York Times Portfolio Review.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement:
My work explores displacement and the ways migration reshapes identity, memory, intimacy, and belonging. Working across photography, artist books, sculpture, and installation, I draw from personal history and collective experience to examine how home is carried across distance—not as a fixed place, but as something reconstructed through images, objects, rituals, and emotional memory. I am interested in how movement, separation, and cultural change leave traces on the body and the psyche, shaping how we understand ourselves and where we come from.
My practice often begins with lived experience, but expands outward into broader social histories. I think through family narrative, migration, faith, desire, and the fragile spaces between private life and public reality. Across different forms, I explore how memory is fragmented, how intimacy can hold both comfort and tension, and how identity is continually made and remade through loss, inheritance, and adaptation.
Rather than seeking a single narrative, I allow contradiction to remain present. I am drawn to the space between distance and closeness, visibility and concealment, permanence and transformation. Through this approach, my work considers how people endure change, and how images and objects can become vessels for what cannot be fully recovered, but still insists on being remembered.
Yshao Lin
Everything I Want Has a Collar, 2022–
Archival inkjet print on paper, archival inkjet prints on transparent film, LED light panels, ceiling framework, and ceiling tiles
Courtesy of the artist
First Year Exhibition
Yshao Lin
長長999 Forever, Forever, Forever X9, 2025
1000 red paper cranes, table, folder,
100 painted photographs, CRT monitor
1 hour, 28 min.
Courtesy of the artist