Kelly Jin Mei (b. 1991, Singapore) works primarily in crochet and textile, a practice she developed from childhood. Her work centres on the materiality of the medium and its layered histories, exploring duality, identity, and ownership through processes of construction and deliberate destruction—disintegration, transformation, and revocation.

Kelly Jin Mei is currently the resident of Delfina Foundation’s summer residency programme Making and Materiality, supported by The Institutum. Jin Mei has exhibited internationally at the 18th International Triennial of Textiles, Łódź (2025); Biennale Jogja 18, Indonesia (2024); and the #4 Objet Textile Biennale, Roubaix (2022). She has held solo exhibitions at Cuturi Gallery, Singapore and ara Contemporary, Jakarta. Her commissions include permanent installations for Bloomberg Singapore and GUCCI’s Marina Bay Sands flagship store.

A significant installation work by Kelly Jin Mei, Qiān Jīn 千金 was commissioned for the 4th Objet Textile Biennale at La Manufacture Museum in Roubaix, France, in 2024. The work extends her sustained inquiry into identity as something held within multiple, fragile, and ultimately breachable shells. The crocheted vessels find their prototype in the liuye zun 柳叶尊, a Kangxi-period form renowned for a silhouette so slender it cannot stand without external support. This structural dependency was reframed as refinement rather than failure — preciousness confirmed by the very care it demands. Jin Mei draws an explicit parallel with foot-binding: both practices impose an ideal on a body or form for the beholder's pleasure while eliminating self-sufficiency, then aestheticise the resulting helplessness as grace. The title Qiān Jīn 千金 holds this contradiction in a single phrase. It denotes the blessed daughter of the wealthy household, but colloquially also the spoiled and over-contained — to be valued in this particular way is never separable from the terms of one's enclosure. The four vessels are individually titled after the first four Heavenly Stems, insisting on the structural rather than exceptional nature of the condition while individuating each object within it. Each hangs at a distinct angle of arrested fall, suspended by strands of hair — a material that protects through cultural preciousness rather than strength, and which simultaneously rescues and chokes. The burning opens the crocheted surface to expose the hollow interior. What the rupture reveals is both the absence of necessary interiority in the object defined entirely by the gaze, and the sudden existence of an aperture where the shell was previously sealed. Destruction and disclosure arrive together.