Yi-Wen Lin

Artist

Yi-Wen Lin · wensday.co/rippling ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/yi-wen-lin ↗

Based

From Taiwan; documented working in London in 2023

Practice

Generative art, creative coding, real-time simulation, and interactive digital environments

In the set

Rippling ↗ · 128 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Yi-Wen Lin is a Taiwanese creative coder and generative artist whose practice joins computational systems to sensory and cultural memory. A 2023 interview situates Lin in London and traces a path from computer science studies in Taiwan through professional work in Paris and London.¹ The interview also identifies WebGL rendering as a core technical competency and describes Lin's recurring effort to connect an Eastern cultural education with experience of Western working environments. This cross-cultural position supplies a working method: inherited stories, motifs, and habits of perception are translated through contemporary code, while digital processes retain atmosphere, variation, and emotional association.

Lin's work repeatedly tests how a rule-based system can produce an image that feels contingent and lived. The Madison Museum of Art & Technology characterizes the practice through cultural cross-pollination and experimentation with random elements.² The resulting compositions resist a clinical understanding of simulation. Their procedural structures remain visible, but light, texture, pacing, and references to natural phenomena soften their underlying calculations.

Rain as a computational surface

Art Blocks records Rippling as a collection of 128 unique editions released on 17 March 2023.³ Its images evoke rain disturbing a reflective surface, positioning each output between recognizable observation and abstraction. Bright marks gather into wave-like structures while changes in density, direction, and colour suggest light moving across water. The project is therefore less a literal depiction of rainfall than a system for organizing its perceptual effects.

The six outputs reproduced here demonstrate the range contained within that shared grammar. Some appear sparse and finely articulated, while others compress their marks into luminous, turbulent fields. Repetition establishes continuity across the collection, but differences in colour and spatial rhythm prevent any output from functioning as a definitive image. Across all 128 editions, Rippling distributes its subject through variation, treating weather as an event perceived in changing moments rather than a scene held still.

Live on Art Blocks: rippling-by-yi-wen-lin ↗

From screen image to situated experience

Lin's broader practice places Rippling within a sustained inquiry into translation between media. At Generative Taipei On-Site in 2023, Lin contributed Sequencing to a live-mint setting in which visitors encountered and received a unique generated work on location.⁴ The project used the Fibonacci sequence to organize millions of points and cubic spaces in three dimensions, joining mathematical structure to an event of public participation.

A related presentation paired Lin with Naiting Liu to interpret Miao embroidery from the Hong-Gah Museum collection through generative techniques. The curatorial account stresses that code could not reproduce the textile's material qualities exactly, and treats that gap as the source of a specifically digital material language.⁵ Lin focused on the embroidery's squares, repetition, and subtle internal differences, translating those observations into blocks that remain similar without becoming identical.

This concern with the screen as a spatial object continued in Disorder. Reviewing the 2024 Tokyo edition of the dialog() Asian Generative Art Exhibition, Kaori Tada described real-time code producing chaotic moving lines whose shadows, colour, and framed display made them appear physically present.⁶ A report on the Taipei edition records Disorder within an exhibition that expanded generative art across monitors, a dome, and extended-reality presentation.⁷ The National Taiwan University of Arts museum similarly listed Lin in Supports of Dreams, Surfaces of Things, a project examining screens as containers that translate vision and space rather than neutral carriers of images.⁸

Lin has also worked collaboratively at larger social and institutional scales. Project Percentage, presented at Ars Electronica in 2022, joined Taiwanese generative artists in a nonprofit experiment connecting digital art, public fundraising, and a mountain landscape motif.⁹ In the online exhibition A Fly Enters. Immense Breath of the SEA, Lin helped create a digital setting for sound and experimental-music exchanges across Taiwan and Southeast Asia.¹⁰ These projects clarify the stakes of Rippling: code carries experience between memory and image, craft and simulation, individual perception and shared space.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Yi-Wen Lin links page ↗.