Yo-Yo Lin is an Taiwan-based interdisciplinary artist who focuses animation, installation, and performance.
Yo-Yo Lin is an artist whose work really moved me because it is inseparable from her own physical condition. Her chronic illness isn’t just a subject she references, it actively shapes how she makes decisions as an artist. She spoke openly about long periods of fatigue and medical treatments.
That experience directly shaped Recollections. The work doesn’t move forward in a straight line because illness doesn’t either. Instead of telling a story with a beginning and end, the piece feels like drifting through moments of waiting, diagnosis, recovery, and uncertainty. You can feel how time stretches and collapses. The focus is less on what happened and more on how it felt to live inside a body that’s constantly being monitored, treated, and interpreted by others.
Her illness also influenced the visual language she uses. Symbols from traditional Chinese medicine, like meridian pathways and ideas of energy flow, appear alongside Western medical imagery such as scans and data readouts. That contrast reflects her lived reality of moving between different systems of care and belief. It’s not theoretical. It comes from her trying to understand her own body through multiple frameworks at once. She doesn’t dramatize pain or ask for sympathy. Instead, she turns vulnerability into a shared space.