BIO
I am the daughter of Lie Chenn Lin and Yin Chou Lin, born in Taiwan into a big extended farming family from which I was taken away when we immigrated to Canada for my father’s graduate education. I’m an interdisciplinary artist, writer/poet and educator in love with the forests of cedar as they burn up in fires stoked by colonialism. Through storytelling and ceremonial activism, I am co-becoming a world of kincentric justice. I pray for the water beings slipping through our fingers. I live in Nonotuck/Nipmuc Land, Western Massachusetts in a town named after a genocidal invader of Turtle Island. I listen to places for ancestral hauntings. I love co-creating kincentric immersive arts with communities restoring and restory-ing good relations with Land, Water, Earth. My burning questions: “how can the arts heal relationships harmed (almost irreparably) 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, Zoe Todd, Karen Barad, and many other companions.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
We live in a time of polycrisis—the destruction of the earth, the massive loss of millions of species and potentially the end of human existence, brought about by the collapsing systems created by wealthy nations in the name of “progress.” My work is propelled by the urgent need to repair the life-destroying, extractive patterns of capitalism and coloniality; and to revitalize traditional knowledges and ancestral wisdom to heal collective, intergenerational trauma. My art practice draws on these potent veins—decolonization and regenerative community-building forging new kincentric relationships. My community performances integrate storycraft, 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.
FORMAL BIO
JuPong Lin is an independent artist, practice-led researcher, writer and cultural worker who dances with horseshoe crabs and makes ceremony with cranes. Her mission is to hospice the dying colonized world, serving as death doula through the arts and poetics to create futures of joyful interspecies co-becoming. JuPong’s current poetry and socially-engaged art projects focus on shifting the paradigm of conquest, genocide and ecocide and narrating new kinds of stories and worlds in pluriverses (many worlds) that honor beloved heartplaces. JuPong was a faculty member in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College for nearly 20 years before the College closed in 2024. She recently completed her doctorate in Environmental Studies at Antioch University New England.
JuPong’s first play, Phoenix in the HolyLand, aims to contribute to global peace movements working to end ecocide and genocide (omnicide). JuPong’s poems have been published in several Writing the Land anthologies and academic essays are included in Ecological and Social Healing: Multicultural Women’s Voices and Contemplative Practices and Acts of Resistance in Higher Education: Narratives Toward Wholeness.