Candice Lin is known for her inventive use of materials – ranging from tea to cactus tinctures to fungi to dead bats – in ways that emphasise their particular properties, including scents and tastes. Lin embraces exhibition tactics often associated with anthropology and natural history, which she re-purposes and re-formulates to pose complex questions about the colonial histories embedded in these disciplines and materials. Xternetsa builds off of Lin’s recent installation works Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping (2021), a tented temple-like structure including indigo textiles, ceramic cats, and a video animation guiding visitors through Qi gong movements, and the table-top pieces from The Mountain (2016), which held, among other objects, paintings, living silkworms, mulberry plants, ceramic fragments, and a taxidermised iguana. Reconfigured in Xternetsa, the tables lead us through stages of transformation: mud from a swamp in Saint Malo, the first Asian settlement in the United States, has been fired into ceramics; starch from the kudzu plant has been boiled and molded into bioplastic; and traditional Chinese herbs such as ginseng and Dong quai have been electroplated in copper. Together, her materials evoke historical backstories of artisanship, labour, ritual, botany, global trade, and the violent power of Western colonial desire to envelop them all.
Madeline Weisburg
