Windy Chien
United States
Chinese-American artist Windy Chien is best known for her 2016 work The Year of Knots (Abrams, 2019) in which she learned a new knot – out of the almost 4,000 documented– 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.
She loves fringe culture as punk rock and owned a legendary independent music shop in San Francisco (Aquarius Records) for 14 years. She spent many years at Apple, where she joined a fledgling iTunes and shepherded it through the ensuing eight years of explosive growth as iTunes product manager, producer, and curator, and then App Store managing editor. She later launched her studio in 2015.
She makes sculpture and site-specific installations that elevate the vernacular forms of knots to inspire awe and understanding. To the intersection of function, mathematics, and history where knots reside, she introduces aesthetics to illuminate what’s most fascinating about them: the journey of the line. The finished works are minimalist rope sculptures that utilize pattern, repetition, and monumental scale to emphasize the poetry of the line. She seeks unusual materials to incorporate provenance and metaphor, such as frayed, soiled climbing ropes, decommissioned fire hoses, and seat belt webbing. She uses composition and technique to explore the tension between assumed ideas, such as in my Circuit Boards series, which contrast male-dominated tech world motifs via gendered skills of so-called “women’s work”—the crafts of macramé, passementerie, weaving.
Select clients include the National Geographic Society, Nobu Hotels, IBM, Google, and the Kering Group, and her work has been covered by Wired, The New York Times and Martha Stewart.
She makes art full time, and considers virtual reality and video games to be two of the most exciting art forms of the moment.
A Week of Knots