Author Description

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. 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. Exhibition: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, Aotearoa/New Zealand (08.08. - 15.11.2020) / Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou, China (20.03. - 16.05.2021) / Spike Island, Bristol, UK (05.02. - 08.05.2022).