APPLEPEAR: Work by Helen Lin

APPLEPEAR brings together photography, drawing, video, and installation to explore how the body carries desire, collective memory, and cultural pressure. My work centers on elements that feel familiar and intimate such as hands, mouths, fruit, or jewelry symbols that shift meaning through my staging and manipulation. I’m drawn to the ways we give meaning to these gestures and how they can appear erotic, violent, or sacred depending on the viewer’s gaze. 

I believe trauma and desire often exist together and view them as inseparable. My images and video work speak to that overlap between pleasure and sorrow, yearning for something but holding feelings of hurt. Cultural and familial histories, my own and those of others, are stored in the body, shaping how we carry ourselves. For many people, the body can be both a site of longing and a place where harm has been stored. Objects like fruit serve as vessels to carry these ideas, as they decay, bleed, seduce, and hold memory. 

The exhibition expands these ideas through two installations that turn them into a shared experience. Saving Face recreates a bedroom-like environment where viewers encounter written memories from first and second-generation immigrants reflecting on their experiences growing up. These stories speak to cultural expectations, family dynamics, and the pressure to maintain appearances while carrying private struggles. 

In the adjacent living-room installation, viewers are invited to sit and watch Is This How We Love?, a single-channel video composed of portraits of individuals eating fruit that was once cut for them by a parent or caregiver. A gesture that is simple and deeply familiar becomes a reflection on the ways love and sorrow are communicated indirectly through acts of care rather than words. 

Together, these works consider how love, grief, and cultural memory are passed between generations, and how the body becomes the place where those inheritances are held.

Admission is free and open to the public