Windy Chien
Windy Chien (b. 1967 Taipei, Taiwan Lives and works in San Francisco, CA, US) is an artist best known for her 2016 work, The Year of Knots, in which she learned a new knot every day for a year. Her work ranges in size from a knot that can fit in the palm of a child's hand to room-sized installations that are sought after by private collectors. Following long careers at Apple and as the owner of legendary music shop Aquarius Records, she launched her studio in 2015. Select clients include the National Geographic Society, the De Young Museum, the San Francisco MOMA, Nobu Hotels, Google, and the Kering Group, and her work has been covered by Wired, The New York Times, and Martha Stewart. Windy’s book about her work was published by Abrams in 2019.
www.windychien.com / Instagram @windychien
Artist Windy Chien in her studio
In the knot world, the term Hitches denotes a family of knots that must be made around an object; if the object around which the Hitch is tied were to be removed, the Hitch would collapse and lose its integrity. This concept inspired Windy Chien’s sculptural installation series Hitching Post (2019–present), a group of works in fittingly related compositions that dovetail with an understanding of hitching posts as gathering places where people come for recreation and camaraderie.
Windy Chien pays homage to the historical intersection of early tech with craft in her Circuit Board series (2016–present). The series is inspired by the work of craftswomen—particularly Navajo weavers living on the Shiprock reservation in New Mexico—who assembled and constructed circuit boards and computer memory modules for advanced technology companies and even NASA Apollo missions during the late 1960s.
Chien’s inventive series celebrates the significant contributions of those craftswomen and challenges a largely-accepted hierarchy that values tech far above craft and which persists to this day. Her works explore the tensions in these gendered assumptions, contrasting a motif from the male-dominated tech world with techniques and materials representative of so-called “women’s work.” By intertwining these ideas of connection and power, she expands the definition of digital to include handicrafts alongside hardware and software, once again.