Adelle Lin

Silence | Violence I’ve been hesitant to post this, or maybe just unsure what the words should be. That hesitation itself feels connected to the work, and to how many people have described feeling over the last year. This performance from nearly two months ago extends my ongoing study of silence as something charged and structural: silence because we are unsure what to say without causing harm, silence because we are suppressed by authority, silence because we fear consequences we cannot yet see. I’ve realized that body as a site of protest, and body as a site of violence, is something I’ve been exploring for some time now, asking of myself what I would not ask of others. With my mouth taped shut, I moved across the written text, agitating it so the body became both witness to and carrier of suppressed speech. Performing on the street is meaningful to me too, in a place where so many have left marks of dissent. We must continue to work toward the freedom of those who cannot speak, and of those still living under the daily threat of bombs and gunfire. For this piece, I worked with site-specific materials. I used black gaff tape from the theater to pre-redact the paper, then invited the audience to help rip the tape away, uncovering a silence embedded in the work itself. Written in Hebrew, Arabic, and Chinese, my ancestral languages, the piece invites different levels of legibility, recognition, and inclusion. Thank you to @thegenefrankeltheatre for supporting this work, and to everyone who came and took part. I can’t find the group photo we took 😭, so if you have it, please send it to me. Your support in these difficult works means everything.💜💚🖤💛🤍🩵 I’ll be continuing this street calligraphy practice throughout the summer. Photos by a lot of different people x Blue pigment by @mikeambron

Happy Earth Day! 🌍 I’m excited to share that I’m a 2026 Queens Arts Fund recipient for Water Portraits of Queens: A Community Ecology Archive—a project connecting ecological observation with cultural practice. Water Portraits of Queens invites Queens residents to collaborate with me and Newtown Creek in creating calligraphic textiles shaped by community stories and environmental conditions. Rooted in my ongoing research into water bodies as artistic co-authors, the project includes water collection alongside Hunters Point Parks Conservancy’s monitoring activities. Free public workshops in summer and fall 2026, culminating in an exhibition at Flux IV @flux_factory The work asks: How do environments shape identity, memory, and the stories we carry? Thank you @nyfacurrent and @nyculture for supporting Queens artists, and @hyperallergic for the mention! Thank you @storefrontpsychic for the support on this grant process! 📷 Photo taken by @dan.devine.studio during my residency @art_omi

لا حرب 无炸弹 לא לרחפנים 和平 שלום سلام This is a piece I made for a window on Bond Street as a daily prayer for those passing through the streets of Manhattan. We are living through tenuous times in which entire peoples are being held at the whims of authoritarian leadership. Those in power are not acting in the name of people or ideals, but for ego and economic gain. They do not speak for all Jews or all Muslims. We have been neighbors, we are neighbors, and we must not forget it. How Silence Speaks is a layered multilingual calligraphy work that brings Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, and English into shifting relation. Activated by programmed light, fragments alternately emerge, flatten, and disappear, revealing how silence is shaped by visibility, power, and technological hierarchy. Installed in the street-facing window, the piece reflects on what happens to voices under pressure: which are amplified, which are suppressed, and how communities are divided by forces that do not speak for them. Thank you @pataroid and @thegenefrankeltheatre for supporting this work and message 💜 The work is on view this month. 🎨 pigments by @mikeambron 📸 @amandaelizaw @youngsunart myself

A wonderful overview of @everywomanbiennial by @sarahecascone from @artnet . Thank you to the curators and organizers mollymcaldwell @ashleyedes Biennial founder @iamfinley and Gallery Executive Director @dawnoftheart ! Deep gratitude to the entire team at Pen+Brush and the art installers! Our interactive installation #SoftUpload received a positive mention with a quote from @adellelin 🔮 ‘Some of the work on view was participatory. Adelle Lin Yingxi and Young Sun Han presented a surprisingly meditative, A.I.-powered interactive fortune teller work titled Soft Upload, in which viewers type their confessions into a neon console. The piece then generates a printed receipt with a customized “ritual of reconstruction” that combines your input with the responses of other visitors. Snippets of those messages, from a prompt about what participants wish to preserve, are displayed on a monitor at the booth’s entrance. “I wanted to collect the spirit of the audience that comes to the Every Woman Biennial because it’s such a strong feminist vibe,” Yingxi said. “Hopefully by the end of the show, we’re gonna have a beautiful tapestry of what strong, empowered women in New York believe we need to preserve in the world right now.”’ “Every Woman Biennial: Spectalia” is on view March 8–April 11 at Pen and Brush, 29 East 22nd Street, New York, New York.

Excited to share a new work in the window of the historic Gene Frankel Theatre, presented in conjunction with The Unusual Chauncy Faust, on view March 18–29. Please join us for the opening on Thursday, March 26 from 6.30pm for drinks, nibbles, and a street calligraphy performance by myself around 7pm. How Silence Speaks is a multilayered installation of light and calligraphy. Activated by a programmed system of suspended lights, fragments of English, Chinese, Arabic, and Hebrew emerge, flatten, and disappear as color states shift. The work approaches silence not as absence, but as a structural force shaped by visibility, power, and technological hierarchy. Presented alongside The Unusual Chauncy Faust, the work sits in dialogue with the play’s exploration of manipulation, language, and the blurred line between the familiar and the surreal. Do check it out! Colored pigments made by @mikeambron Materials sourced from @mftanyc

Opening weekend at @everywomanbiennial @penandbrushnyc , I felt especially honored to be among friends and such distinguished women artists, each holding powerful voices, visions, and hopes for the future. Thank you to everyone who spent time with Soft Upload during this opening. Your presence, curiosity, and willingness to engage made the work feel fully alive. Created with @youngsunart Soft Upload is a divination-style interactive experience that merges ritual and machine. Visitors type confessions into a neon interface and receive procedurally generated transformation rituals printed as cosmic receipts. The piece asks what it means to trust AI systems with our intimate thoughts. If each conversation is a kind of consciousness transfer into a broader technological ecosystem, what are we giving away, and what are we receiving in return? Each ritual connects your thoughts with another participant while offering actions to ground you back in body, breath, and environment, blurring code and spell, spectacle and sincerity. Fragments also dissolve into a digital crystal ball-like form that shifts over the course of the exhibition, merging with traces of other Every Woman Biennial participants to create a larger spell around what we collectively want to preserve. Thank you @erinkostudios and @mollymcaldwell for all your support! On view through April 11 so please come through! PEN + BRUSH 29 E 22nd St, NYC

SOFT UPLOAD Install done! Please come through the curtains to try it out. SPECTALIA opens today @penandbrushnyc @everywomanbiennial Happy international women’s day!! Soft Upload is a divination-style interactive experience that merges ritual and machine. Visitors type confessions into a neon console and receive procedurally generated transformation rituals printed as cosmic receipts. Their words dissolve into a digital crystal-ball form that evolves throughout the exhibition, merging into a communal chorus of traces. Blurring code and spell, spectacle and sincerity, the work resists the fantasy of uploading away from the body—returning instead to touch, memory, and breath as a feminist counter-spell for the algorithmic age. Details: MARCH 8TH—APRIL 11TH, 2026 Tuesday—Saturday 11AM—6PM OPENING March 8th from 1—6PM PEN + BRUSH 29 E 22nd St, NYC 10010 Special thanks to @erinkostudios for curating and producing all the new media artworks! #internationalwomensday

Very excited to be sharing Soft Upload for the first time at The EVERY WOMAN BIENNIAL with @youngsunart Soft Upload is a fortune-telling style interactive installation that merges ritual and machine. The EVERY WOMAN BIENNIAL @everywomanbiennial in its 6th edition SPECTALIA opens Sunday, March 8th at Pen and Brush Gallery, 29 E 22nd St, 1-6 pm, through April 11th. Gallery Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 11 am-6 pm. There will be a constellation of events and performances throughout the month on weekends as well; check them out at . Special thanks to @penandbrushnyc #everywomanbiennial2026 #art #nyc #womenshistorymonth SPECTALIA

When New York gives you snow… Finally felt compelled to pick up my brush again after 4 months since my residency upstate. I’ve been puzzling over this blockage. Perhaps it’s the urban landscape - so overwhelming that only when it’s engulfed in nature’s blanket can I reconnect with this practice. Or perhaps it’s snow’s ephemerality that urges me to move - to be in it and preserve it. These works extend my Water Portraits series. Snow is water in transition - between states, between sky and ground, between seasons. In the western U.S., snow comprises 75% of the water supply. By 2050, models project that snow accumulation across many regions will decline by 20-30%. These portraits are becoming documents of something increasingly rare - both the snow as a life force and the quiet it creates that allows this practice to emerge.

What comes after 42? 🌌 Douglas Adams posits that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42 in, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. During this past year, moving towards our 43rd solar revolutions, we wondered: What comes next? At the nexus of our birthdays, we invited our community into an interactive performance and communal ritual to explore aging, grief, life extension, and the transition of our consciousness. We rebirthed ourselves after an entwined slumber, awakening to contemplate the transfer of our beings into the digital and spiritual unknown. Guided by a “Deep Thinking” computer and our Consciousness Transfer Protocol web site, we and the audience shared our reflections on questions related to dying and the things that make us unique. As responses were entered and read aloud, the Protocol processed these words through a playful and poetic AI collaboration to generate a collective ritual which offered actions, incantations, and things to observe in the coming days. The base of our sarcophagus turned into an altar where symbolic materials were collectively placed in order to activate and perform the ritual. Participants were invited to write something to release onto a slip of paper which dissolved into a vessel of water, then bottled into small potions as a memento. Thank you to everyone who brought their openness and energy into the space. It was a moving, humorous, and meaningful ceremony to share on our birthdays. As the debut of an ongoing project, this performance examines how we rely on technology to soothe our most human concerns. We look forward to evolving this performance workshop to further explore whether AI can support connection rather than deepen isolation. 🏺✨ Credits & Gratitude: Host/Venue: Connor Finnerty (@concon_____ / @a_soft_opening_ ) DJ/Decor: Nolan Elsbecker (@echosofpetrichor ) Costume Design: Kari Love (@ikyotochan ) Music: Dan Gorelick and Cassian Rose (@dqgorelick @cassianrx ) Videography: AX Mina (@leilahbabiryedocumentary ) Support: Mark Barnett, Matt Pinner, Minjoo, Andrea Parmelee, Samir Patel, Dincer Savaskan, Shane Williams. Excerpts read: The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller

As we light the first candle for Hanukkah tonight, it feels more like a memorial than a celebration. Had actually completed these individually lit Earth Bija pieces today. Instead of lighting for joy, heart goes out to fellow Australians and Jewish folk. Further thoughts: I experienced some of the most blatant and also nuanced racism when I first moved to Australia. I was still in my late teens and was living at one of the campus colleges. Some of the experiences were so isolating and dehumanizing, where I felt like I couldn’t go back to where I came from, and also that I couldn’t stay. Eventually hard code switching and some kind locals “saved” me, but we must understand that racism is deep and systemic, and when it applies to one group of people, it almost certainly will apply to other groups. Any preferential treatment of one minority group over another only masks a problem for a time. Even as we speak out for one group, let’s not wish harm on another. Thanks @soapboxdarby for the chat. #racialjustice #hanukkah #antisemitism antiracism

We’re so excited to share that Tonii amulets are now available through the New Museum Store ✨ They are a newly featured item on the store’s main page, as well as the holiday gift guide! This new collection unfolds through a web-based Augmented Reality experience. Each amulet includes a meditation by @oneofmany.studio , along with reflective prompts by @adellelin with questions to consider. We hope you check them out and if you’ve thought of supporting our work in the past, we would be so grateful for your support ✨ Find them via the link in bio 🤍 Shoutout to @jonahbest for shooting and editing, and to @wildcatebonybrown for modeling ✨ So grateful to Dan and Monique at @newmuseumstore , and to @newinc @newmuseum for nurturing this project from its early seeds.