Candice Lin presented solo exhibition A Hard White Body, a Soft White Worm at Frankfurt’s Portikus, which opened February 10 and is running to April 8.
The installation “invites viewers into a fragmented environment of broken porcelain” where Lin weaves together disparate narratives, drawing from stories of James Baldwin, Jeanne Baret and Maria Sibylla Merian in a room alive with moist green moss, fungi and unfired ceramic. The pieces, while confronting loss and absence, also explore a “diasporic longing for a portable home [that] creates new genealogies by affinity.”
Porcelain’s most well known characteristic of being strong and resistant (and described in the press release as “a racially anxious language as an exquisite white body, a Chinese secret of Western Orientalist desire, inimitable until the mid-eighteenth century”) is turned into a fragile, porous body. Alongside the sculptural works, detox herbal tea is boiling, awaiting each visitor.**
