As we welcome visitors to our Collective Care exhibition, we take a closer look at Eve Lin's work as the Curriculum Developer Climate Justice at LCF. A Mother's Guide to Love, reflects on the theme of collective care through a deeply personal and cultural lens.
In this interview, Eve Lin shares their journey—growing up in Taiwan and how the concept of "quiet love" has shaped their creative expression. Through their personal experiences and artistic vision, Eve explores how love is expressed not through words, but through actions and cultural rituals.
By connecting quiet, unspoken emotions to larger themes of community and cultural sustainability, Eve’s digital garments and voluminous designs represent an innovative approach to fashion and art. Their work provokes deep reflections on the different ways love and care manifest across cultures and generations, inviting viewers to reconsider their own relationships with these universal themes.
The Collective Care exhibition is open to the public from 24 September to 14 December, inviting everyone to reflect on the connections between personal well-being, cultural heritage, and our planet’s health. Join me as I speak with Even Lin to uncover the inspirations behind their work and how they are pushing the boundaries of care, culture, and sustainability.
My work, A Mother's Guide to Love, explores how my Taiwanese mother expressed love through religious practices, such as temple visits and prayers for blessings for the family.
In Taiwanese culture, particularly among my parents' generation, love is often expressed through these collective acts of devotion rather than words. This reflects a broader cultural emphasis on collective responsibility, where individuals care not just for themselves but for their families and communities.
Through calm, reflective motifs and garments, I try to capture this quiet yet profound expression of love. The project connects personal well-being to broader communal care, using religious and cultural heritage as a way to represent collective responsibility.
Growing up in a strict Taiwanese household with high academic expectations, I often felt the pressure to excel academically. And sadly, I failed so much with my academic work. However, I love drawing and being creative when growing up. My mother prayed for my academic success, but she also encouraged my creative pursuit by investing in art classes. This combination of indirect support and expectation really influenced my work.
My creative development was rooted in this quiet but powerful love, which later informed my study of fashion design and garment making. This upbringing helped me understand the struggles of international students and shaped my approach to expressing quiet love through creative practice, which plays a central role in my work today.
In Taiwanese culture and my parents' generation, love is often expressed indirectly, through actions rather than words. My mother showed her care through temple prayers rather than verbal affection, which felt emotionally overwhelming at times. This dynamic informs the aesthetic of my work, where the garments feature exaggerated, voluminous designs to reflect the intensity of quiet, unspoken love.
The emotional tension of quiet love manifests in the forms of my garments, capturing the paradox of a love that is both subdued and overwhelming. This aesthetic approach conveys the powerful, often unspoken emotional currents within Taiwanese familial relationships.
The digital garments in my work embody care by incorporating patterns inspired by temple visits in Taiwan. I used kaleidoscope-filtered footage of Wanheng temple in Taichung to create abstract, moving patterns that evoke a spiritual sense of care. These shifting patterns replace traditional textures on the garments, conveying religious devotion and quiet acts of love. Though this work leans more toward visual art than fashion design, my background in fashion influenced how I integrated symbols like Buddha and temple guardians. The experimental, conceptual approach shows the connection between cultural rituals and the expression of care through digital mediums.
Viewers from various cultures have connected with my work’s theme of maternal love, even if their experiences differ. Many, particularly from Europe or the UK, noted that their parents also expressed love through actions, like cooking or working, rather than verbal affirmations. This shared experience reveals the universality of love being shown through non-verbal acts of care. While some may interpret my work as reflecting a quieter, more introverted form of love, the theme of indirect, embodied care resonates across cultures, offering a shared insight into maternal love’s varied expressions.
I plan to further explore quietness as a form of care within East and Southeast Asian cultures. Quietness is often misunderstood as passivity, but I see it as a powerful expression of love, care, and cultural heritage.
In future projects, I would love to explore further how quietness manifests in self-care, environmental care, and community care. I’d like to collaborate with students, researchers, and practitioners to develop work that deepens this exploration. Through collective action, I hope to foster new dialogues around care and cultural sustainability, creating projects that reflect diverse cultural expressions of love and responsibility.