PRESENTATION: Candice Lin- Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping

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. Often taking shape as DIY apparatuses, or what have been described as “flayed circulatory systems,” her multilayered and sensorial installations combine commodities such as sugar, cochineal, and tea into liquid distillates that circumnavigate the space of the gallery.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Walker Art Center Archive

Candice Lin’s sculptures manifest as tangible inquiries into histories of exoticism, Western degradation of and desire for the “Other,” and the logic and legacy of oppressive structures and systems. Co-organized by the Walker Art Center and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Candice Lin’s exhibition “Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping” is composed of elements the artist created while sheltering at her home studio during the pandemic. Anchored by a nomadic tent structure—simultaneously a temporary shelter and a quasi-religious temple—the exhibition includes hand-drawn and hand-printed indigo textiles, hand-built ceramic sculptures, plaster and concrete “tactile theaters,” and a video animation that leads visitors through qigong breathing and movement exercises. for her Walker Art Center and Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts project, the artist brings together hand-dyed indigo textiles, plaster sculptures to be touched by visitors, large-scale ceramics partially inspired by Chinese tomb guardians and a hallucinogenic video featuring dancing cats and spam texts. Taken together, this multipart installation addresses the anxiety, isolation, fear and anger of this tragic year of pandemic and social upheaval, emphasizing touch, intimacy and a collective questioning of our precarious present and future. Texts explore Lin’s innovative use of materials and mediums and the theoretical frameworks that animate her art. A fully illustrated plates section documents the artist’s process of research, making and installation, and an annotated selection of Lin’s major past exhibitions provides important context for works made over the last decade.

Candice Lin (b. 1979, Concord, Massachusetts) works in Altadena, California. 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 utilizes installation, drawing, video, and living materials and processes, such as mould, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains. Lin has had recent solo exhibitions at the Pitzer Galleries, Claremont, CA; Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Art Center, Canada; Ludlow 38, New York; Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles, (all 2019) as well as the exhibition cycle “A Hard White Body “at Bétonsalon, Paris (2017); Portikus, Frankfurt; and the Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago (both 2018).

Photo: Candice Lin, Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping, Exhibition view Walker Art Center-Minneapolis, 2021, Courtesy the artist and Walker Art Center

Info: Curators: Victoria Sung, and Dan Byers, Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN, USA, Duration: 5/8/2021-2/1/2022, Days & Hours: Thu 11:00-21:00, Fri-Sat 11:00-20:00, https://walkerart.org/