Artist Windy Chien is best known for The Year of Knots (2016), in which she taught herself a new knot every day for a year—an undertaking that launched her artistic practice. Her sculpture and installations explore the expressive potential of knots and highlight the intelligence embedded in hand labor and craft traditions, revealing knots as an ancient human technology. Her work ranges in size from a knot that can fit in the palm of a child’s hand to room-sized installations collected by private and institutional clients.

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Before launching her studio in 2015, Windy spent many years at Apple and later owned the beloved San Francisco music shop Aquarius Records. Her clients include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young Museum, the National Geographic Society, the U.S. Department of State, the Kronos Quartet, Nobu, Google, and Meta. In 2025 she was named one of the Eames Institute’s inaugural Curious 100, and her work has been featured in Wired, The New York Times, and Martha Stewart. Her book The Year of Knots was published by Abrams in 2019.

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I’m a Chinese-American woman who grew up a US Army ‘brat’ and lived all over the country, including a decade in Hawaii. Due to my ethnicity, love of fringe cultures such as punk rock, and uncommonly audacious attitude toward life, I’ve always felt like an outsider. Indeed, I’ve embraced outsider status as a means to self-define, rather than let the world tell me who to be.

I owned an independent San Francisco record shop (Aquarius Records) for 14 years, building community and evangelizing the music I loved. My music knowledge is encyclopedic and infectious—I can easily sell your grandmother a heavy metal record. Then, I spent many happy years at Apple, where I joined a fledgling iTunes and shepherded it through the ensuing eight years of explosive growth as iTunes product manager, producer, and curator, and then App Store managing editor. I make art full-time and consider virtual reality and video games to be two of the most exciting art forms of the moment.

I’ve cycled across Southeast Asia (twice), toured with Lollapalooza, presented my undergraduate thesis film at Sundance, and am a certified yoga instructor. I rescue greyhounds.

I make sculpture and site-specific installations that elevate the vernacular forms of knots to inspire awe and understanding. To the intersection of function, mathematics, and history where knots reside, I introduce aesthetics to illuminate what’s most fascinating about them: the journey of the line.

Knots are artifacts of human ingenuity: an ancient technology predating the wheel and use of fire. Knots manifest tension, the direction of pull, and forces working in harmony and in opposition. Examining these empirical aspects, I consider their physical function, cultural significance, and aesthetic value. I gave myself the assignment to learn a new knot—out of the almost 4,000 documented—every day for one year, creating The Year of Knots (2016). As I sought fluency, I came to recognize knotting as a universal language spoken across oceans, centuries, genders, and occupations.

Drawing from The Year of Knots as my ongoing palette, each of my ensuing bodies of work explores a single, exquisite knot in search of its ultimate expressive potential. The finished works are minimalist rope sculptures that utilize pattern, repetition, and monumental scale. Increasingly, I seek unusual materials to incorporate provenance and metaphor, such as frayed, soiled climbing ropes, decommissioned fire hoses, and seat belt webbing. I use composition and technique to explore the tension between assumed ideas, such as in my Circuit Boards series, which contrasts male-dominated tech world motifs via gendered skills of so-called “women’s work”—the crafts of macrame, passementerie, and weaving.

My practice melds art with craft, aesthetic with function. While the output is often beautiful, this quality is intended to draw the viewer in and provoke awareness of the concepts behind the visual harmony: a deeper clarity of looking.