Artist's Statement
In 2023, my fiancée left me and the life I thought was ahead of me, the house, the kids, the career I'd been building for ten years, just wasn't there anymore. I felt completely lost.
In my deepest grief, I found myself at the temple. I joined the Burning Man temple build in 2024 and 2025, and the work did what I couldn't do alone. It helped me process what I'd lost, and it opened a door toward building art that connects people with themselves and their own journeys.
As someone born in Taiwan and raised in America, I've always felt called to represent Asian culture, especially at a place like Burning Man where I'd never really seen it.
When Hui Woon brought the thúng chài to the table and their story about meaning in migration, I knew we had something special. Something that speaks to the meanings and identities that shift over time, and something that speaks to Asian Americans and immigrants everywhere who feel lost between the culture they came from and the culture ahead.
I wanted to weave in my own Taiwanese roots. Lanterns have always been a vessel for our wishes for the future, and they were the perfect way to honor the passage of the thúng chài and our own passage through transition.
Do Baskets Dream is my way of answering the call that life threw at me. I don't know what's ahead, but I'm brave enough to step off the shore and wade out to sea, to let myself feel the magic of being lost among lanterns that light a path toward something I can't yet see.
- Luke Lin