Candice Lin - The Agnotology of Tigers
The following images are photodocumentations taken by Charles Champagne for the LSU Museum of Art. LSU MOA presents Candice Lin: The Agnotology of Tigers from October 20, 2021 through March 20, 2022. This exhibition is part of an annual collaboration featuring an LSU School of Art visiting artist.
Candice Lin: The Agnotology of Tigers features recent works based on archival images from LSU, alongside a new configuration of Lin’s tobacco version of La Charada China.
Lin’s installation illuminates sublimated histories of social violence and a politics of forgetting that obscures the history of indentured Chinese labor and its dehumanizing effects still manifest in global policies and lingering stereotypes. Lin’s most recent works explore how these processes intersect with LSU football’s “Chinese-bandits” and cheerleaders who dressed as “coolie” laborers.
The installation derives from a syncretic, divination-type gambling game practiced in the Caribbean primarily by Chinese laborers. In Lin's hands, she speculates that this game could have functioned within the community as a way to redistribute wealth.
ABOUT THE ARTIST Candice Lin works primarily in sculpture and installation. Born in Concord, MA, Lin now lives and works in Los Angeles where she serves as Assistant Professor of Art at UCLA. Lin is also a Prospect.5 artist: work featured as part of Prospect.5 will further explore her research into Louisiana’s history of indentured Chinese labor.
The porcelain sculpture was created on site with LSU School of Art students Kyra Jackson, Matt Jones, Nickeyia Johnson, Cecelia Moseley, Gillian Harper, Lu Colby, Paul Acevedo Gomez, Thras Kalaitzidis, and Ali Saunders during Candice Lin’s visiting artist workshop. This sculpture will be eroded over time by the distillation system of La Charada China (Tobacco Version).
A distillation system drips a tincture of tobacco, tea, sugar, and poppy onto an unfired porcelain sculpture. This tincture of valuable colonial commodities speaks to the intertwined histories of plants and humans both within plantation economies and herbal medicine. As it drips, it erodes the unfired porcelain—metaphorically dismantling the presumed associations of whiteness with purity, superiority, and hardness. In this exhibition, Lin will work with students at LSU to create the porcelain sculpture that will later be destroyed in the liquid process.
This exhibition is a collaboration between the LSU College of Art & Design, the LSU School of Art, and the LSU Museum of Art. Support is provided by The Winifred and Kevin P. Reilly Jr. Fund and generous donors to the Annual Exhibition Fund.
Supported by a grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Office of Cultural Development, Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, in cooperation with the Louisiana State Arts Council, as administered by the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge. Funding has also been provided by the National Endowment of the Arts.
LSU MOA thanks the generous donors to the LSU MOA Annual Exhibition Fund: Louisiana CAT; The Imo N. Brown Memorial Fund in memory of Heidel Brown and Mary Ann Brown; The Alma Lee, H.N. and Cary Saurage Fund; Robert and Linda Bowsher; LSU College of Art + Design; Mr. and Mrs. Sanford A. Arst; and The Newton B. Thomas Family/Newtron Group Fund.
