Artist Statement
My work begins with listening to ancestry.
The figures I make have been erased twice: first from history, then from the material record. I search thrift bins and recycling centers for the clothing of people the world moved past — qipaos and work shirts, rebozos and silks, garments from Chinese, Mexican, and diasporic communities, the dress of workers, immigrants, and ancestors, discarded. From what was thrown away, I create Descendants.
I approach ancestry as a living relational force, not a historical subject. I work as a conduit, through ritual, site-based research, and material intuition, translating ancestral presence into form. I deconstruct and reconstruct: cleaning, cutting, stitching, layering, until discarded textiles become them. Standing six to eight feet tall, dense with layered material, the Descendants are simultaneously monumental and fragile. They are rooted in the past, but they do not look like the past. They look like a mythology that hasn't been written yet.
The series began in 2021, during the pandemic, when I was excavating my own family's immigrant journey to the West. Those first figures were sewn from recycled sportswear using quilting and mending techniques — my people, in my hands, made from what was left behind. Working in residency at the Portland Chinatown Museum in 2023, the practice expanded into something larger: the laborers, porters, merchants, and women whose work built Oregon and whose names did not survive it. I returned them as Pioneers, Innovators, Guardians, and Healers. The figures grew taller.
What connects all of it is the act of rewriting. I am not illustrating existing mythology — I am authoring new myths from the fragments of old ones, stitching together oral traditions across cultures, transforming women who were objectified and sacrificed into heroes, pioneers, tiger women who chose their own terms.
I do not recover the past. I reconstruct it from what survived the throwing away.








Exhibitions & Residencies
2027
2026
2025
2024
2023
2022
Awards, Publications, & Talks
2025
2024
2023
2022
2016 Shoemaking Apprenticeship - Nassier Vies Studio, Toronto, ON
2015 Titanium Grand Prix winner, Cannes, France
2015 Shoemaking Workshop - Shoe School, Port Townsend, WA
2014 Leather Manipulation - Chicago School of Shoemaking, Chicago, IL
2005 Gymnastic World Championships, Eindhoven, Netherland
2003 Gymnastic World Championship, Hannover, Germany
© 2026 Joshua Sin
All Rights Reserved