Meet the Maker Using Knots to Draw in Space
California artist Windy Chien crafts painterly compositions and graphic sculptures with tight formations of cord
Windy Chien’s design vocabulary may concentrate on the humble knot, however, she’s spent the past decade expanding her lexicon, elevating this often-overlooked intersection of interlaced material in the process. “My collectors bring me the stories, and I get to tell them using my language,” says Chien, who has garnered an impressive client list since launching her art career ten years ago.
Today, her work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the de Young Museum, and been acquired by the National Geographic Society, the U.S. Department of State, Google, and Meta. There is a six-month lead time for residential and commercial commissions.
Recent projects include a 14-by-233-foot piece that wraps the perimeter of the Rockwell Group-designed Nobu Grand Wailea restaurant in Maui, which she created on-site in nine days, and a 100-foot-long work of intersecting links hanging in a stairwell atrium at Dropbox’s San Francisco headquarters. Collectors Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, asked Chien to create a piece to accompany a pair of 1,000-year-old Tang-dynasty ceramic horses displayed in their foyer. For inspiration, she looked to Spring Excursion, one of the oldest surviving Chinese landscape paintings, interpreting it in knotted cord to create what she describes as “a landscape for the horses to play in.”
Knotting has existed for thousands of years—the practice is sometimes called “ancient human technology,” and research suggests it could date back as far as the Lower and Middle Paleolithic eras. Some knots are functional; some have symbolic meaning. Almost 4,000 types are documented worldwide; Chien works with just over 360. She has developed several bodies of work—what some might describe as individual patterns or designs—each built around a single form. Some emphasize geometry and pattern; others explore movement, systems, or cultural history. “My work is rooted in craft,” she says. “So I start with the materials themselves, and I let them tell me what they want to become.”
Chien works with custom-made Sunbrella cord, specifying not only color but diameter, stiffness, and pliability. With thicker, stiffer varities, she can “draw in space,” using line to create forms in three dimensions.
Born in Taiwan to Chinese parents and raised between New York and Hawaii, she collected knotting books as a child but, she admits, “I didn’t open a book and tie a knot. I just thought they were cool.” Later, she studied experimental film at San Francisco State University, then owned the legendary San Francisco store Aquarius Records for 14 years before joining Apple’s original iTunes team.
Chien jokes that her myriad experiences are akin to living three different lives; this most recent iteration, however, is a return to something familiar. In the early 1970s, her mother had taught her to make a macramé plant hanger, but it wasn’t until Chien took a refresher class (after trying ceramics, wood carving, and painting) that it all came back. “I remembered, I do love this. It agrees with my body and my brain.”
She spent a year learning a different knot every day, and subsequently published The Year of Knots, documenting the physical and emotional process. However, compiled into one of her painterly installations, its not always obvious that’s how her compositions are formed. “You’re never going to take one look at it and know exactly what it is,” she notes. “You come in close and look at it and go, ‘How is this made? How is this done?’”
Chien invokes that same curiosity in her own practice. During a residency aboard a schooner in the Arctic, she watched glacier calving for the first time and began thinking about climate change and humanity’s relationship to nature. Another residency, at the Eames Institute, gave her time to experiment with weaving and make pieces that had lived in her sketchbook for years. She calls these stretches away from her studio “Tiger Time”—a period to experiment, play, and follow an idea without knowing where it will lead.
But even after a decade of working with knots, Chien is still learning new ones and finding different ways to evolve her practice. She’d like to partner with a museum on a project where a community would spend two or three months tying knots together, followed by an exhibition of the piece they created. This was inspired, in part, by seeing the results of the week-long workshops she leads once a year. “I realized that when people are making together, in community, your hands are busy, which means your mind is really open.”
She believes that creating, or any other artistic practice, is a form of meditation, and one that can be life-changing. With the potential community project she aims to “call attention to the act of making as being just as satisfying and creative as the finished piece. Because when you get really focused on what your hands are doing, that is the flow state. And that is utter bliss.”