Candice Lin: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping

  • A view of the multi-part installation made of indigo dyed cotton panels from the front left corner of the gallery. The artist has batiked the indigo dyed cotton panels with images of cats and mirrored patterns of flora. Sculptures of stacked bodies-- multi-armed and multi-breasted fertility figures—flank the left and right sides of the tent. The floor underneath the tent is covered by white and gold carpets with unique designs of cat guardians and other mystical figures of the artist’s imagination. Ceramic cat shaped pillows sit sporadically. Visitors are encouraged to lay on these pillows or sit under the tent.

    Installation view of Candice Lin: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 2022. Center: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping, 2021. Hand-printed (katazome) and hand-drawn (tsutsugaki) indigo dyed panels, steel bar, dyed rugs, glazed ceramics, epoxy resin, feathers, block-printed and digitally printed fabric (masks), bells, tassels, miscellaneous small objects, video (color, sound); 4:45 min. Courtesy of Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Photo: Julia Featheringill. 

  • A view of the multi-part installation made of indigo dyed cotton panels from the front of the tent. The artist has batiked the indigo dyed cotton panels with images of cats and mirrored patterns of flora. Sculptures of stacked bodies-- multi-armed and multi-breasted fertility figures—flank the left and right sides of the tent. The floor underneath the tent is covered by white and gold carpets with unique designs of cat guardians and other mystical figures of the artist’s imagination. Ceramic cat shaped pillows sit sporadically. Visitors are encouraged to lay on these pillows or sit under the tent.

    Installation view of Candice Lin: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 2022. Center: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping, 2021. Courtesy of Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Photo: Julia Featheringill. 

  • This is an image of two hand painted rugs and A Journal of the Plague Year (Cat Demon Diary), 2021 mounted opened to a random spread. A dark yellow-brown rug with a hand painted image hangs to the right of the journal. The word “Read” is painted in the top left corner of the rug above a long-haired person reclining with an open book. The reader pets a cat. Another cat sits beneath the reclining person. A cream-colored rug with a hand painted image hangs to the right of the exit door. A figure stands between to seated gargoyles with bearded human like heads. The gargoyles sit upon a human skull with a thorny rose passing through the temples of the skull. “Don’t Fight” is written at the top of the rug. “Death Wins” lines the bottom of the rug.

    Installation view of Candice Lin: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 2022. Left: A Journal of the Plague Year (Cat Demon Diary), 2021. Fabric-bound artist's book. 2 x 10 x 12 inches. Courtesy of Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Photo: Julia Featheringill. 

  • This is a photo of A Journal of the Plague Year (Cat Demon Diary), 2021 mounted opened to a random spread. The top half of the left page includes a watercolor drawing of two half cat-half human figures facing one another. Two strips of indigo-dyed cotton are adhered to the bottom of the page.

    Pictured: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping, 2021. Center: A Journal of the Plague Year (Cat Demon Diary), 2021. Photo: Awa Mally, courtesy of Walker Art Center.

  • A photo of the corridor featuring three hand painted textiles hanging on the wall to the left. One of the tactile theaters, Tactile Theater #2 (after Svankmajer), 2021 is exhibited on the right. The “tactile theater,” modeled after the conceptual artist Jan Svankmajer focuses his artistic practice on revealing the power and evocations reveled from touch or tactile connections. The artist carved dips, divets, and grooves of various widths and depths into a multicolored plaster block for patrons to touch. This tactile theater is mounted on an armature made of black metal bars. Two wood-topped stools with legs made of the same black bars, are positioned on either side of the theater.

    Installation view of Candice Lin: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 2022. Right: Tactile Theater #2 (after Švankmajer), 2021. Plaster, pigments, hide glue, fiberglass, epoxy, steel. 11 x 28 x 32 inches. Courtesy of Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Photo: Julia Featheringill. 

  • This is a photo of a “tactile theater, ” modeled after the conceptual artist Jan Svankmajer. Svankmajer focused his artistic practice on revealing the power and evocations reveled from touch or tactile connections. The artist carved dips, divets, and grooves of various widths and depths into a plaster block for patrons to touch. The plaster has a marble pattern made of deep sienna, browns, and creams. This tactile theater is mounted on a cube made of black metal bars. Two birch stools with legs made of the same black bars, are positioned on either side of the theater.

    Pictured: Tactile Theater #2 (after Švankmajer), 2021. Photo: Awa Mally, courtesy of Walker Art Center. 

  • This is a photo of a “tactile theater, ” modeled after the conceptual artist Jan Svankmajer. Svankmajer focused his artistic practice on revealing the power and evocations reveled from touch or tactile connections. The artist carved dips, divets, and grooves of various widths and depths into an all grey concrete block for patrons to touch. This tactile theater is mounted on a cube made of black metal bars. Two birch stools with legs made of the same black bars, are positioned on either side of the theater.

    Pictured: Tactile Theater #1 (after Noguchi), 2021. Photo: Awa Mally, courtesy of Walker Art Center.

  • This is a photo of four multi-colored ceramic cat pillows spread out on the hand-painted yellow and white carpet panels underneath the tent Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping, 2021.

    Installation view of  Candice Lin: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2021. Photo: Awa Mally, courtesy of the Walker Art Center.  

  • This is a photograph offering a perspective of looking through one of the holes in the panels on the top of the tent, Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping, 2021. You can see the white and dark brown ceramic cat pillow resting on hand-painted yellow and white carpet panels.

    Installation view of Candice Lin: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2021. Photo Awa Mally, courtesy of Walker Art Center

Opening Reception

Per Harvard University guidance related to escalating COVID-19 case levels, there will be no opening reception for this exhibition.
Please consult our Programs page for future programs related to the exhibition.

Masking &
COVID-19 Vaccination Guidance 

To ensure all of our visitors have a safe and enjoyable experience, masks, as well as proof of full COVID-19 vaccination or a negative COVID-19 PCR test administered within the previous 72 hours will be required for visiting the exhibition.

 

Conversation 

Candice Lin, C. Riley Snorton, and Hentyle Yapp

 

VIEW RECORDING

DOWNLOAD PDF

PRESS RELEASE 

Exhibition

Feb 4 – Apr 10, 2022
Levels 1 and 3

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.

Curators: 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

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.

Artist Conversation: Candice Lin with Exhibition Co-Curators Dan Byers and Victoria Sung

Candice Lin Artist Talk. Courtesy of the Walker Art Center. 

Selected Press

LA Times (August 2022)

Boston Globe (March 2022)

Art Review (March 2022)

Artforum Critics’ Picks (August 2021)

Artforum Interviews (November 2021)

ArtReview (March 2021)

BOMB Magazine (October 2021)

Generous support for Carpenter Center programming is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.