[1][2][3][4]: 67–69 Since the early 1990s, she has made experimental films, videos, and documentaries that examine the politics of identity and cultural translation, informed by the poetic and conceptual qualities of moving image media.
[5][6] Lin is also the author of Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).
[4]: 68 At Bard, Lin was affiliated with an emerging group of artists and filmmakers, such as Matthew Buckingham, Sadie Benning, Jennifer Montgomery, and Julie Zando.
[4]: 67 By 2001, they began working collaboratively as the artist team Lin + Lam, developing multi-disciplinary research-based projects concerning the construction of history and collective memory.
[3] Lin authored the book Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer, published in 2017 by Fordham University Press.
[20] In the book Pedagogies of Woundedness: Illness, Memoir, and the Ends of the Model Minority (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021), James Kyung-Jin Lee writes about Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects, describing Lin's approach as a methodological fulfillment of Mel Y. Chen’s call to "contemplate attachment and vulnerability to the inanimate as a radical form of queer love".
[25][26] In the program catalogue, Simon describes the work as drawing upon a "global image bank to offer some elusive variations on the picturing of women in the domestic arena" functioning as a "ready-made ethnography" that considered the feminine figure of the homemaker.
[1] In a review for LA Weekly, film critic Manohla Dargis writes that: “Through lush images and narrative shards, Lin builds a lyrical critique of the ways in which the figure of the Japanese woman exists in the imaginary.”[27] Described as a "UFO diary film," Stranger Baby (1995) sees Lin drawing upon alien iconography to explore her experiences of growing up in the west.
[28] Including a layered soundtrack with voiceovers that form a collage of narratives and interviews, these voices articulate the complexities of race and gender relations, examining the destructive tendency towards racial profiling.
[3] Taking from the aesthetics of bootleg VCR tapes, Taiwan Video Club (1999) follows a community of Asian immigrants, predominantly women, who recorded and exchanged videotapes of serial Taiwanese television programs.
[9]: 29 Featuring 'poor images' that bear the traces of mediation, alongside insertions of text, the video work invites and challenges ideas of cultural translation.
[24][29] Lin filmed 27 diverse interviewees whose lives were impacted by cancer, all of various ages, backgrounds, and sexual identities, reading excerpts aloud from Lorde's book.
[24] Described as "poetic nonfiction", the film further layers scenes such as two acrobats supporting each other in the air, an interviewee performing a yoga routine, and close-ups of a mastectomy scar.