Lin + Lam
artist duo

Lin + Lam (est. 2001) is a New York-based artist collaboration composed of Lana Lin and H. Lan Thao Lam. Lin + Lam is known for multidisciplinary research-based projects that explore immigration, political sites, and the construction of historical memory through interviews, archival materials, and found objects. The collaboration draws upon each of their backgrounds in time-based media, installation, sculpture, photography, and architecture.
Lin + Lam's 2021 film, Three Missing Letters, was screened at the San Diego Asian Film Festival, Nepal America Film Festival, Onion City Film Festival, and European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück, Germany.
Their work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New Museum, The Kitchen, and the Queens Museum, New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, ARKO Arts Center (Korean Arts Council), Seoul, the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, China, and the 2018 Busan Biennale.
Lin + Lam has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art Production Series, and the India China Institute at The New School, New York.
History
Early collaborations (2001–2005)
Lana Lin and H. Lan Thao Lam first met in 2000, finding shared interests in politics of feminism, postcoloniality, and critical discourse. Their social circles overlapped from both of their experiences with the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, which Lin did from 2000 to 2001 and Lam did from 2002 to 2003. Lin and Lam found their respective backgrounds in moving image and installation art to be overlapping and complementary.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Lin + Lam” as artist duo. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as artist duo. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 26, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q122388936. The first chronological checks are 2001, 2021, 2018 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lin + Lam” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.