Helen
Lin

I work across photography, drawing, video, and installation to explore how the body carries desire, collective memory, and cultural pressure. My images often focus on elements that feel familiar and intimate, such as hands, mouths, fruit, and jewelry, symbols that shift meaning through my manipulation. I'm drawn to the ways we give meaning to these gestures and how they can appear erotic, violent, or sacred depending on the viewer's gaze.

I believe trauma and desire often exist together and view them as inseparable. My images and video work speak to the overlap between pleasure and pain, between yearning for something and holding feelings of hurt. Cultural and familial histories, my own and those of others, are stored in the body, shaping how we carry ourselves. For many people, the body can be both a site of longing and a place where harm has been stored. Objects like fruit serve as vessels for these ideas, as they decay, bleed, seduce, and retain memory.

I am also interested in video as a kind of affective map. My video work, with personally written lines of text, is made to feel like fragments of a movie. They are emotional records of internal monologues we may rarely share with others. In them, I ask questions about grief, intimacy, and longing: Who would grieve for me? What if everything were different? My drawings echo these themes, so by photographing references, I turn them into small-scaled and high contrast charcoal portrayals. I want to show the tension between love and conflict. Together, these works create an ongoing exploration of how we remember, how we desire, and how those states of being often blur into each other.