Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Installation
Website: windychien.com
Windy Chien is a Chinese-American artist based in San Francisco who creates large-scale rope sculptures and site-specific installations. She grew up as a U.S. Army dependent, spending time across various American locations including a decade in Hawaii before settling in San Francisco. Before establishing her studio, she ran Aquarius Records, an independent San Francisco music shop, for fourteen years, then spent more than eight years at Apple—joining during the early days of iTunes and eventually serving as managing editor of the App Store. She launched her studio in 2015 and is based in the Mission District.
Her artistic practice was crystallized by The Year of Knots (2016), a self-imposed daily discipline in which she taught herself one new knot every day for an entire year, ultimately documenting 366 knots and sharing each one on Instagram. The project generated widespread press attention—including coverage in Wired and This Is Colossal—and resulted in seven book offers. She published The Year of Knots: Modern Projects, Inspiration, and Creative Reinvention with Abrams Books in 2019. In 2025, the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity named her to its inaugural Curious 100, recognizing innovative makers and creative leaders.
Chien’s institutional clients include SFMOMA, the de Young Museum, the National Geographic Society, the U.S. Department of State, Google, Meta, Nobu Hotels, and the Kering Group. Her work scales from palm-sized pieces to room-sized installations and is held in both private and institutional collections.
Chien works primarily in cotton and synthetic rope—most often in white, black, and occasional touches of gold—using wrapping, hitching, and knotting techniques to build sculptures that range from intimate to monumental. Her practice draws on knots as an ancient human technology existing at the intersection of mathematics, function, and history, and she is drawn to the nearly four thousand documented knots as a formal vocabulary. She has described her aesthetic goal as wanting “to magnify the gorgeousness of knots,” favoring restraint: “when there are no frills, the design can speak more clearly and loudly.”
Recurring bodies of work include the Circuit Board series, which pays homage to the largely overlooked labor of Navajo craftswomen who assembled circuit boards and computer memory modules for aerospace contractors in the late 1960s; the Hitching Post series, which reinterprets the utilitarian horse-tethering post as a meditation on interdependence and communal space; and Quilted Planes, geometric suspended sculptures that shift as the viewer moves beneath them. Across all her series, pattern, repetition, and scale are the primary formal tools, producing work that is simultaneously minimalist and labor-intensive.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.