Travis Jeppesen and Yutong Lin Named 2026 Artlab Editorial Fellows

Hyundai Artlab has announced Travis Jeppesen and Yutong Lin as the recipients of the 2026 Artlab Editorial Fellowship.

Now in its fourth year, the Artlab Editorial Fellowship extends Artlab Editorial's mission to foster writing about today's most compelling artists, celebrate connectivity in all its forms, and envision the future.

This year's Fellowship invites two art writers whose texts on contemporary art exercise critical empathy, navigating the balance between care and critique, the interrogative and intuitive, the perceptive and imaginative, and engage through dialogue to deepen understanding.

Each Artlab Editorial Fellow will receive $10,000 to produce three pieces of writing for Artlab Editorial over the course of the year and will be paired with one of this year's Fellowship Advisors, Mira Dayal and Gary Zhexi Zhang, for regular one-on-one guidance and mentorship throughout the program, alongside Artlab Editor Shannon Lee.

This year's Fellowship received an overwhelming response to its Open Call, attracting over 800 exceptional applicants from 80+ countries and 165 cities around the world.

2026 Artlab Editorial Fellows

Open to art writers from anywhere in the world and at any stage of their career, this year's Fellowship welcomes Travis Jeppesen and Yutong Lin whose essays promise in-depth perspectives that test the limits and conditions of language in contemporary art.

Travis Jeppesen is an American writer and artist living in Berlin. His books include Settlers Landing, Bad Writing, Poems I Wrote While Watching TV, See You Again in Pyongyang, and Victims. He is known as the creator of object-oriented writing, a metaphysical approach to art writing that attempts to inhabit the art object. His first major object-oriented writing project, 16 Sculptures, took the form of an audio installation and was featured in the Whitney Biennial 2014, and later, as a solo exhibition at Wilkinson Gallery in London, and finally published in book format by Publication Studio. A former editor at Artforum and Art in America, he is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. His calligraphic and text-based artwork has been exhibited internationally. From 2019 to 2022, he served as assistant professor at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Industry at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where he helped establish an MFA program in Curating. In 2023, his play Ghosts of the Landwehr Canal was premiered to critical acclaim at the Berliner Ringtheater; his earlier play, Daddy, was staged at HAU Theater in 2009, starring Vaginal Davis. His new collection of short stories and fictocriticism, For Those Who Hate a Little Bit of Everything, is out in 2026 from Schism.

His essays for the Artlab Editorial Fellowship will analyze the processes and conditionality of art criticism, unpacking style, the taxonomy of a bad review, and what it means to critique an artist whose explicit intention is to create “bad” work.

Yutong Lin is a writer, translator, photographer, and video artist based between Montreal, Canada, and Yunnan, China. Her work explores forgetfulness and misremembering in material and linguistic conditions. She traces stories, hearsay, and folk legends to map the cultural and geographical contours of Southwest China's Himalayan borderlands through fieldwork. Her first photobook Zomia Garden (Canadian Centre for Architecture) reframes the history of plant hunting in Southwest China through Indigenous plant knowledge and geography. She is currently developing Afterword, an editorial and publishing project with Yidan Li that foregrounds the translator's labor and sensibility as a spatial and architectural inquiry. Her work has been presented at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), 99Canal, Centre des arts actuels SKOL, and Fondation PHI, among others.

Her essays for the Artlab Editorial Fellowship will explore grief, untranslatability, and the ethics of writing at the limits of language.

About Hyundai Artlab

For over a decade, Hyundai Motor has deepened its partnerships with museums and cultural organizations worldwide, including Tate, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Hyundai Translocal Series is a new partnership initiative that roots itself in fostering dialogues and collaboration among art institutions in Korea and across the globe. Hyundai Motor's own art initiatives include open call programs such as the VH AWARD, Hyundai Blue Prize+, and Artlab Editorial, a digital platform dedicated to art writing by transnational voices. These ongoing collaborations embrace the complexities of the cultural landscape by exploring new ideas and perspectives within and beyond the art ecosystem. The team steering these partnerships and initiatives is Hyundai Artlab. Our goal is to spark meaningful dialogue, cultivate empathy, and facilitate collaborations that connect across boundaries.

About Artlab Editorial

Artlab Editorial is a destination for critical engagement with contemporary art. With interviews, reviews, essays, and profiles, Artlab Editorial publishes writing that offers an opportunity to better understand the past, reconsider the contemporary, and envision the future. In its first four years, Artlab Editorial has published writers from around the world, including Rahel Aima, Karen Archey, Melissa Baksh, Shumon Basar, Julie Baumgardner, Allie Biswas, Hunter Braithwaite, Nancy Baker Cahill, Dawn Chan, Scarlet Cheng, Minji Chun, Allison Noelle Connor, Samantha Culp, Joshua Paul Dale, Mira Dayal, Travis Diehl, Aindrea Emelife, Claire L. Evans, Mary Flanagan, Orit Gat, Amy George, Jennifer Higgie, Ayana Jamieson, Ladi'sasha Jones, Charlotte Kent, Dean Kissick, Jeeyoung Lee, Shannon Lee, Michelle Lhooq, Whitney Mallett, Camila Marambio, Christina Catherine Martinez, Emily McDermott, Irini Mirena-Papadimitriou, Manuela Moscoso, Cassie Packard, Lee Pivnik, Syaura Qotrunadha, Rachael Rakes, Andrew Russeth, Kenny Schachter, Barry Schwabsky, Diana SeoHyung, Mindy Seu, Elizaveta Shneyderman, Monica Uszerowicz, Anuradha Vikram, Wendy Vogel, Claire Voon, Linda Yablonsky, Mika Yoshitake, LinYee Yuan, and Gary Zhexi Zhang, along with past Artlab Editorial Fellows, Olamiju Fajemisin, Laurie Rojas, Jiaying Sim, Skye Arundhati Thomas, Elvia Wilk, and Kira Xonorika.

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