Candice Lin: The Agnotology of Tigers at LSU Museum of Art

LSU Museum of Art (LSU MOA) will present Candice Lin: The Agnotology of Tigers this fall at LSU Museum of Art (LSU MOA) 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 will feature recent works based on archival images from LSU alongside a new configuration of Lin’s tobacco version of La Charada China. Central to Lin’s project, La Charada China (pictured above) features a stereotypical “coolie” figure made of pressed tobacco leaves alongside other plants and materials entangled in the indentured Chinese labor trade. 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. 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.

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.

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.