Four years ago, Jia-Jen Lin (MFA '07) traveled halfway around the world to study in a country she had never visited and in a language she could barely speak. "I became very quiet," says Lin, a mixed-media performance artist who left her home in Taiwan to enroll in the Museum School. "My classmates didn't know how to talk to me. I didn't know how to talk to them. It was complete culture shock."

Trained as a painter but eager to explore other media, Lin began to translate her feelings of displacement into her artworkspecifically, wearable sculptures and other sculptures based on her body. She made a latex full-body self-portrait that inflates and deflates and vinyl-tube hair extensions that trail behind her and coil around her body. "Most of the sculptures are not so comfortable," Lin says. "They make me look different," which mimics the awkward self-awareness she has felt while living in a foreign environment.

Before coming to Boston, Lin earned a BFA at National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, then spent a year teaching high-school art. She grew frustrated by the narrow confines of Taiwanese art education and its focus on traditional western painting. "I had an interest in mixed media and sculpture, but there was no chance to pursue a more conceptual kind of art at my school," Lin says. Leaving home and coming to the United States gave her the freedom to study art in a "horizontal" way, she says, incorporating a variety of media and principles into her work before choosing her own place of "depth."

Today Lin's sculptures reach beyond "self-healing," as she describes her earlier work. She documents Asian cultural ideas about the roles of women and individuals in society; she also likes to explore the more tangible, physical effects of performing with her pieces. "I try to go beyond traditional sculpture," she says. "I like the interaction between the materials and my body. Sometimes I walk around, sometimes I lie down and spread out. I try to use my body to make the most possible shapes."

The dramatic effect Lin creates with her Medusa-like hair extensions, for example, or an abstract bowing figure made out of clothes hangers, belies the simplicity of her materials. "They're regular things, just translated in a new way," she says. "People say, 'Oh, wow,' and I say, 'It's from Home Depot."