Venice Biennale 2022: Part two

 

Candice Lin

Because I am fascinated by the way materials carry ideas, I spent quite some time looking at the work of Candice Lin. She was using all sorts of materials and media; tea, fungi, dead bats, ceramics, video, electro-plating, plants, silkworms, mud, paintings and of course drawings. At first the work looks as if it has been done by a mad scientist, perhaps a crazy anthropologist or pre-Darwinian biologist. But then you realise that this is about looking at colonial histories, histories that are embedded in the various disciplines and materials she is using. I particularly found the table-top pieces interesting, she was able to hold together paintings, living things, plants, ceramics and found objects by connecting them with stories. The tables set out stages of transformation: mud from a swamp in Saint Malo, the first Asian settlement in the United States, had been fired into ceramics; starch had been boiled and moulded into bioplastic, stories of craft, labour, ritual, botany, global trade, were all looked at from a perspective that reminded us that our present society has pushed out to the margins so many alternative ways of working and being. We need a bit of magic in our lives and Lin was seeking to put it there. As for whether or not this is drawing, I would still include it in the extended umbrella of contemporary drawing practice, as these objects are all threaded together, as Tim Ingold would say, by lines of thought.

Candice Lin

There were no clear divisions between Lin's pieces, one seemed to bleed into another. Her ceramic figures operated as plant pots as well as being God like totems, nothing being fixed and operating more like verbs than nouns. For instance the electro-plating was being done as you looked at the work, therefore it was still becoming rather than being finished. For all these reasons I think I remembered Lin's work more than any other. However I am trying to deal with very similar issues, especially the idea that all is constantly in flux and after reading David `Bohm's 'Wholeness and the implicit order', I am even more convinced that this is a good direction to take. He had this to say about what he called 'undivided wholeness in flowing movement'...

"there is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly,... in this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather they are different aspects of one whole and unbroken movement." (1995, p. 11)

Lin taught me not to be worried by work that might at first feel totally chaotic or unformed, so I'm much less of a completer finisher now and more of an anything might go sort of artist. 

Image (c) Vincent James

Image (c) Vincent James

These two images of my work from a recent exhibition were of sculptural objects meant to be unsettled and between things; insides on the outside, plants too big for their landscapes, no coherent use of materials, scales confused etc. So what might have been wrong a while ago becomes for me at least, the right thing to do now. I have to keep reminding myself that if all is flux, I need to constantly re-invent myself and my metaphors too. 

See also:

Venice Biennale part one