Candice Lin

Born 1979 in Concord, United States of America
Lives and works in Los Angeles, United States of America

UNSW Galleries

 I breathe through my anus (night stone), 2024

ceramic with manganese glaze, wood, fiberglass, resin, manganese and ochre pigments, preserved sea cucumbers, silk, bamboo, paper, water, pumps, plastic tubing, wire, hardware and audio.

Co-commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA, Melbourne with generous support from the Terra Foundation for American Art. Courtesy the artist and François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles.

Despite a dominant narrative that casts First Nations Australians as disconnected from the wider world, for several centuries Australian Indigenous people were part of an extensive trading system. Trepang (sea cucumber) is known to have been exchanged between the First Nations people of coastal North Australia and late Ming, early Qing China via the Makassar (Indonesian) trade network. Small Makasan boats called prau (or perahu) are depicted in early Indigenous Australian drawings made from manganese, an ore mined dangerously from Indigenous land to this day.

Interrogating the boundary between cultural exchange and exploitation, Candice Lin has used manganese-gold-glazed ceramics to map the region between Australia and Asia, surrounded by a slick, black moat made of manganese and resin, reminiscent of an oil spill and traditional Chinese winding canal tables. While the fragments of a ceramic disc spin like a fractured record, an accompanying audio tells the story of a sea cucumber whose sexuality is morphed by an imagined ‘manganese spill’. At once discordant and melodic, Lin’s work depicts cultures and identities drifting apart and flowing together, both as fluid and as enduring as the ocean, and equally susceptible to corruption.

Candice Lin is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, drawing, video, and living materials and processes, such as mould, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains. Her work deals with the politics of representation and issues of race, gender, and sexuality through histories of colonialism and diaspora.

Read more about the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, by purchasing the catalogue here.