Pigs & Poison

Candice Lin’s art explores marginalized histories, colonial legacies, and the materials that link them. She invokes and interrogates volatile themes through a research-based practice, giving them a sensuous reality through substances like tobacco, opium poppies, bone-black pigment, and lard. More resonant and pungent than usual art materials, her artworks seep and spill—and in this, they evoke the unruly stains of the exploitation, migration, and disease they reference. Her exhibition, experienced through the ears, nose, and skin as much as through the eyes, calls up centuries-old racialized traumas that still have uncanny and urgent meaning today.

"Pigs and Poison" is published on the occasion of a significant commission and touring exhibition of the same name, co-commissioned by Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth in Aotearoa, New Zealand, the Guangdong Times Museum in Guangzhou in China, and Spike Island in Bristol in the UK, and presented at the three organizations between 2020 and 2022. Lin’s title refers to the nineteenth-century trade in Chinese indentured laborers—disparagingly called “pigs”—and to opium, or “poison,” which in the same period was imported by the British to China and used as both a commodity and a mechanism for controlling the workers who became addicted to it.

Edited by Nikita Yingqian Cai, Robert Leckie, and Zara Stanhope
Texts by Nikita Yingqian Cai, Jih-Fei Cheng, Robert Leckie, Alvin Li, Lisa Lowe, Shani Mootoo, and Zara Stanhopes