Candice Lin: A Hard White Body

Candice Lin – detail from A Hard White Body, 2017, porcelain. Courtesy the artist.

From September 6 to December 23, 2017
Opening on September 5, 2017, 6-9 p.m.

Curated by Lotte Arndt and Lucas Morin

With A Hard White Body, Candice Lin weaves together two stories that do not seem to allow for an obvious connection. At first glance, the black American writer and social critic James Baldwin (1924–1987), and Jeanne Baret (1740–1807), French botanist and first woman to have sailed around the globe, appear to share only their initials. Lin unites these two characters who, despite two centuries of distance, lived out desires that were allowed through displacement from their native lands. They navigated queer and racialized gender presentations that were projected upon them and that at times they embraced.

In her installation, Candice Lin produces a bedroom made of unfired porcelain, inspired by James Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room, that she moistens with a distillation of piss, water from the Seine and medicinal plants perhaps used by Jeanne Baret. Porcelain, this hard white body, evokes purity, whiteness and resistance to cracking or staining. An Orientalist object of desire, it was later used as a bacteriological filter.

Lin mixes porcelain and pungent liquids, invoking histories of exoticism, virology and global trade, and raising the question of a racialized language. She stages processes of contamination between organic and inorganic materials, creating an unstable sculptural ecosystem that requires constant caretaking. Visitors are invited to physically participate.

Download the exhibition publication (BS n°22)

Download the floor plan (BS n°22)

A Hard White Body is produced in collaboration with Portikus, Frankfurt/Main and the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago.
Candice Lin’s exhibition is completed by a series of public programs conceived by Lotte Arndt in collaboration with Temporary Gallery, Cologne. They are sponsored by Perspektive - Fund for Contemporary Art and Architecture, a program initiated by the Bureau for Visual Arts of the Institut français Germany.
The exhibition and its public programs are taking place in the context of the 30th anniversary of the death of James Baldwin (1924-1987).

About Candice Lin
Candice Lin received her MFA in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute and her double BA in Visual Arts and Art Semiotics at Brown University. Her work engages notions of gender, race and sexuality, drawing from scientific theories, anthropology and queer theory. Lin’s work has been recently exhibited at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, LAXART, Kadist Art Foundation in Paris, the Delfina Foundation in London, and Akuna Zentroa/Alhondiga Bilbao, Spain with recent solo exhibitions at Gasworks (London) and Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles). She is represented by Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles and Quadrado Azul in Porto. She lives and works in Los Angeles.