In The Studio: Candice Lin
Artists are found in every district in Los Angeles; find Lin in Altadena
Artists are found in every district in Los Angeles; find Lin in Altadena
Candice Lin
Altadena
When she moved into an Echo Park apartment following her MFA, Candice Lin’s roommate worried about burglary, saying she feared the neighbours would see ‘two white girls’ as an easy target. ‘But I’m not white’, Lin replied.
This anecdote is recorded in Lin’s 2017 essay titled ‘The Body Is a Troubled Thing’. The artist’s elaborate, troubling installations – part sculpure, part machine, part ruin - often allude to the kinds of trouble bodies can go through: whether those of insects crushed to produce cochineal dye (a process re-enacted by pumps and tubes in her 2016 installation, A Body Reduced to Brilliant Colour), or of marginal individuals, whose fragile survival Lin conjured by a landscape of hard, porcelain surroundings in her recent show at Portikus, Frankurt.
Lin’s 2017 collaboration with artist Patrick Staff at L.A.’s Human Resources featured smoke machines, which produced ‘a slow-forming cloud’ that drifted about the space. Visible, and at the same time hard to pin down, this cloud might be taken as a symbol of the powerful but sometimes unseen operations of racial and gender categories, or of a positive way of avoiding identification. Either way, with her inclusion in last year’s ‘Made in LA’, Lin herself is sure to be very visible in the years to come.
