Artist's Statement  |  Curriculum Vitae  |  Teaching Philosophy

Who am I? I’m a Taiwan-born interdisciplinary artist-researcher, writer/poet and educator falling in love with forest beings just as they are burning in the fires stoked by colonialism. Who am I? I am becoming an interspecies justice warrior, storyteller, ceremonial origami artist praying for the water beings slipping through our fingers. Who am I? I live in Nonotuck/Nipmuc Land, Western Massachusetts in a town named after a genocidal invader of Turtle Island. I listen for ancestral hauntings. I make installations and community performances that blend paper-folding, poetics, and storyies to de/colonize hearts, minds, Land, Water, Earth. I taught in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program at Goddard College for almost 2 decades and I’m a PhD candidate in the Environmental Studies program at Antioch University New England. My burning questions: “how can the arts heal relationships harmed by colonization? What is the relationship between healing and justice?” These questions are leading me into unknown territories and becomings where I’m lost in the good company of Bayo Akomolafe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mia Mingus, and many other companions.

JuPong Lin is a Taiwan-born interdisciplinary artist-researcher, writer and educator working to shift climate colonialism through deep listening and culturally-responsive contemplative arts. Her installations and community performances blend paper-folding, poetics, story circle and qigong to activate personal and systemic transformation for Earth justice and community resilience. As a de/colonizing artist and ceremonial activist, JuPong is dedicated to reclaiming ancestral traditions and language liberation. Her workshops cultivate kinship between our beloved 地球 (earth), Land, human and nonhuman Beings. JuPong is a PhD candidate in the Environmental Studies program at Antioch University New England and a faculty member of the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts (MFAIA) program at Goddard College for over 15 years. As the Director of the MFAIA, she led an initiative to establish a concentration in decolonial arts.

Artist's Statement

We live in a time of existential crisis—the destruction of the earth, the massive loss of millions of species and potentially the end of our own species, brought about by the fragmented and failing systems that humans have created in the name of “progress.” My work is propelled by the urgent need to repair the destructive, extractive patterns of neoliberalism and settler colonialism; and to revitalize traditional knowledges and ancestral wisdom to heal collective, intergenerational trauma. My art practice draws on these potent veins—decolonization and restorative community-building, making new kinship relationships. My community performances integrate story craft, energy arts, fiber and paper craft, poetry; and often food.

With Taiwan's 400 year-old story of colonization and occupation trailing behind me, I move through fuzzy borders, stitch by stitch, seed by seed, criss-crossing the seams between neighborhoods, bioregional edges, academic disciplines, nations and states, and culturally hybrid zones. My work evokes critical questions about how we imagine and realize a world of mutual flourishing. The everyday rituals of hanging laundry, steaming bread, and sharing stories seed the soil of my creative practice. By any means necessary—whether with community performance or storytelling, video and/or folding paper cranes and canoes, crochet hook or knitting needles—I work at the peripheries, the dynamic, ever shifting edges of disturbance. Our collective future depends on our willingness to forge relationships between communities and individuals in conflict—to get down on hands and knees and dig into to the common ground we share.