Rotten and Thriving
By The Editors
The past is messy and so is Candice Lin’s practice. In her 2020–22 touring exhibition “Pigs and Poison,” a trebuchet flings balls of oil, wax, lard, and black pigment across the room, splattering the walls. The installation plays to the rumored origins of the Black Death: Mongol troops who catapulted diseased bodies into the walled city of Caffa during a 1346 siege. Along with interrogating racialized narratives of plagues, Lin, with her sprawling interests, dissects colonial-era commodities that were produced by indentured laborers. In the work-in-progress depicted above, for example, she experiments with indigo dyes, which, with mutated techniques, from cassava- to rice-paste resist dyeing, different communities transformed into a medium for beauty and cultural syncretism. In our upcoming issue, AAP will unpack Lin’s strategies for speaking to histories that are unruly, contaminated, and alive. Also, there will be cats.
