A survey exhibition by LA-based artist Candice Lin, who explores legacies of Chinese migration and the interconnected cultivation of crops like tobacco, sugar cane, poppy, and fungi. She has spent a decade working through the material linkages between human histories of colonisation and non-human life in many forms. Her work also expands outward to look at the role language plays in racialising our understanding of contagions, vitality, and cognition.
Exhibition August 08, November 15, 2020.Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Devon Street West and Queen Street, New Plymouth 4342 (New Zealand). Open seven days 10am - 5pm.
The stories unearthed weave together specificities of British and American colonialism and imperialism in China to deliver a complex view of lesser-known histories with a focus on Chinese migration. The works delve into colonial processes familiar to Aotearoa New Zealand and have uncanny relevance today; stories of migration and borders; racial profiling and detainment; bodies and remedies; viruses and war giving unsettling historical context for current conditions.
Lin’s approach to conveying marginalised histories is as varied as the stories themselves, encompassing virtual reality, sculpture, textiles, drawing, painting, and large-scale kinetic installation.
Pigs and Poison premieres at the Govett-Brewster on August 8, 2020 before travelling to partner institutions the Times Museum, Guangzhou, and Spike Island, Bristol.
