Candice Lin: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping

Candice Lin creates multisensory environments that combine ceramics, textiles, drawing, video animation, and other art forms. She often investigates the legacies of colonialism by tracing the trade routes and material histories of a range of colonial goods, layering her work with cross-cultural imagery discovered through this process. Drawing from this imagery and years of material research, Lin has created a new body of work that is grounded in our uncanny sense of isolation and collective experience still shaping these pandemic years.

Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping is composed of richly tactile elements that encourage communal gathering. Created in her California studio during the first year of the pandemic, while increasingly frequent wildfires raged nearby, Lin has devised a set of experiences choreographed by often participatory works that take us through rituals of moving our bodies, touching, and sharing space. The exhibition title references the hands-on nature of her art-making—in particular, the process of fermenting indigo plants to make blue dye, one of the installation’s central materials.

Each work features imagery of anxiety and hope, intimacy and estrangement, and an excess of bodily mutations and hybrid states. They picture relationships that combine animal species in ways that are by turn comic, tragic, heartening, and cathartic. The exhibition also imagines an existence where humans—such neglectful caretakers of our world—are no longer the protagonists. Cats abound in the space in forms ranging from ceramic pillows to a video’s animated cat demon. These complicated feline figures guide us through a world where animals and other nonhuman actors rule.

This softening of boundaries between species combined with Lin’s use of interactive materials—such as dyed fabric, carpets, and sculptures designed to be touched—reintroduces and reimagines the ways in which we can be together after nearly two years of isolation and loss.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue documenting the artist’s research materials and process, with contributions by Mel Y. Chen, Julia Bryan- Wilson, Sir Porte and the exhibition’s curators.

Curated by Dan Byers, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University; and Victoria Sung, Associate Curator of Visual Arts, Walker Art Center.

Candice Lin is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, drawing, video, and living materials and processes such as mold, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains. She addresses themes of race, gender, and sexuality in relationship to material histories of colonialism, slavery, and diaspora. Lin has had recent solo exhibitions at the Pitzer Galleries, Claremont, CA; Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada; Ludlow 38, New York; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago; Portikus, Frankfurt; Bétonsalon, Paris; and Gasworks, London; as well as group exhibitions and biennials at the ICA, London (2019); Para Site, Hong Kong (2019); Beirut Art Center (2019); the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2018); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2017); the New Museum, New York (2017); and SculptureCenter, New York (2017). She is the recipient of several residencies, grants, and fellowships, including a Painters & Writers Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2019), the Davidoff Art Residency (2018), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (2017), a Delfina Foundation residency (2014), a Fine Arts Work Center residency (2012), and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2009). She is Assistant Professor of Art at UCLA and lives and works in Los Angeles.