New monograph.
Candice Lin's art explores marginalized histories, colonial legacies, and the materials that link them. She invokes and interrogates volatile themes through a research-based practice, giving them a sensuous reality through substances like tobacco, opium poppies, bone-black pigment, and lard. More resonant and pungent than usual art materials, her artworks seep and spill—and in this, they evoke the unruly stains of the exploitation, migration, and disease they reference. Her exhibition, experienced through the ears, nose, and skin as much as through the eyes, calls up centuries-old racialized traumas that still have uncanny and urgent meaning today.
Candice Lin: Pigs and Poison is published on the occasion of a significant commission and touring exhibition of the same name, co-commissioned by Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth in Aotearoa, New Zealand, the Guangdong Times Museum in Guangzhou in China, and Spike Island in Bristol in the UK, and presented at the three organizations between 2020 and 2022. Lin's title refers to the nineteenth-century trade in Chinese indentured laborers—disparagingly called "pigs"—and to opium, or "poison," which in the same period was imported by the British to China and used as both a commodity and a mechanism for controlling the workers who became addicted to it.
Candice Lin (born 1979 in Concord, Massachusetts) works in Los Angeles. She received her BA in Visual Arts and Art Semiotics from Brown University, in 2001, and MFA in New Genres from San Francisco Art Institute, in 2004. Her practice utilises installation, drawing, video, and living materials and processes, such as mould, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains. She addresses themes of race, gender, and sexuality in relationship to material histories of colonialism, slavery, and diaspora.
