Candice Lin

📍 Venue → GHMP

Candice Lin is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, drawing, video, and living materials and processes such as fermentation. 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. The multi-sensory environment at the Prague City Library combines a video animation and a series of ceramic censers. A cat demon leads visitors through qigong breathing and movement exercises used for relaxation, self-healing, and martial-arts training, proposing an animist worldview that asks us to shift our focus from the human to the more-than-human world. The censers and candelabra reference the figure of George Psalmanazar, a Frenchman who claimed to be the first native of Formosa (today Taiwan) to visit Europe, as well as non-human swamp creatures and carcasses. The latter are linked to the former fishing village of Saint-Malo near New Orleans, thought to be the first Asian-American settlement in the US. Established by Filipinos, who were later joined by Chinese indentured laborers, the village and the nearby maroon settlement were formed by a disparate group of people living on an unstable, marginal terrain, later destroyed by hurricanes.

Candice Lin (*1979) is an artist whose practice utilizes installation, drawing, video, and living materials and processes, such as mold, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains. Her recent solo exhibitions have been presented at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge, USA (2022), Spike Island, Bristol, UK (2022), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA (2021), Times Museum, Guangzhou, China (2021), Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2020), ICA, NYU Shanghai, Shanghai, China (2020), Pitzer Galleries, Claremont, USA (2020), and the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Art Center, Banff, Canada (2019). Lin has been included in numerous recent group exhibitions including the 2021 Prospect Biennial, the 2021 Gwangju Biennial, the 2019 Fiskars Village Art & Design Biennale, the 2018 Taipei Biennale, the 2018 Athens Biennale, and Made in L.A. 2018 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Lin is included in the 2022 Venice Biennale. She is the recipient of several residencies, grants, and fellowships such as the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019), the Artists Project Award (2018), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (2017), the Davidoff Art Residency (2018), and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2009). She received her BA in visual arts and art semiotics from Brown University in 2001 and an MFA in new genres from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. She is currently an assistant professor of art at UCLA and lives and works in Los Angeles.