Ailin Dong

Ailin Dong (b. 2001, Chongqing) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice investigates the intersections of textile, technology, and identity. Using knitting as both medium and metaphor, she explores the structural and conceptual tensions between tradition and modernity. Through robotics, AI, and digital fabrication, her work examines how cultural narratives endure, mutate, or dissolve under contemporary technological forces. 

Dong’s installations treat fabric as an evolving entity—one that is manipulated, stretched, and reshaped by external forces, much like cultural memory under political and technological pressures. By embedding mechanical systems within textile structures, she challenges the perception of fabric as passive, instead presenting it as an active site of resistance and adaptation. Her research extends into historical craft technologies, investigating how their embedded values can inform new forms of digital materiality. 

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in New York, London, and Toronto. Through her evolving practice, she continues to interrogate the relationship between materiality and agency, questioning how textiles, as an ancient and universal craft, persist as both a technology of survival and a means of negotiating power.

Instagram account: @dalin_dal