Hyundai
About the Fellowship
Art writers today are compelled to attend to the range of human experiences, navigating the familiar and unfamiliar, idiosyncratic and interconnected, coherent and contradictory. Within our contemporary cultural landscape, it is imperative that critics value nuance and interpersonal understanding in equal measure with intellectual precision.
For the fourth year of the Artlab Editorial Fellowship, Travis Jeppesen and Yutong Lin were selected as the two Fellows for 2026. Open to art writers from anywhere in the world and at any stage of their career, this year’s Fellowship welcomes Jeppesen and Lin. Through their essays, Jeppesen (writing about the processes and conditions of art criticism) and Lin (exploring grief, untranslatability, and the limits of language) will actively embody this year’s theme of critical empathy, navigating a balance between care and critique, the interrogative and intuitive, the perceptive and imaginative, and engaging through dialogue to deepen understanding.
Each Artlab Editorial Fellow will receive $10,000 to produce three pieces of web-based writing for Artlab Editorial throughout 2026 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, alongside Artlab Editor Shannon Lee. Through this system of support, Fellows will produce a vibrant body of new contemporary art writing and foster global connections between writers, readers, and artists.
Inspired by this year’s Fellowship theme of critical empathy, artist Thomas Merceron created The Stirring of Sight, a digital commission created specifically for the 2026 Artlab Editorial Fellowship. The work visualizes the play between opposites and the ability to hold two things at once. Drawing on classical landscapes, Merceron's approach positions empathy not as passive identification, but as reciprocal exchange. Merceron presents a vision of nature that thinks, feels, and can perceive us as much as we perceive it. The landscape feels alive, aware, and conscious, inviting care while also unsettling our sense of distance and control. In this way, it mirrors the mission of this year’s Fellowship: to hold care and critique in balance.
About the 2026 Artlab Editorial Fellows: Travis Jeppesen
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.
About the 2026 Artlab Editorial Fellows: Yutong Lin
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 the Program
Artlab Editorial Fellowship
Launched in 2023, the Artlab Editorial Fellowship is a new open call initiative that invites two art writers to consider their communities through the lens of contemporary art. The program extends Artlab Editorial’s mission to foster writing about today’s most compelling artists, celebrate connectivity in all its forms, and envision the future.