“A Sense of Familiar Disorientation”: In Conversation with Candice Lin

On the top-floor of Whitechapel Gallery, an elaborate cardboard labyrinth rises from the ground. The maker of this immersive installation, American artist Candice Lin’s practice has long been rooted in storytelling, exploring how colonial legacies, social histories, and personal grief coexist in the present tense. Lin has exhibited widely with major exhibitions at the Jameel Arts Centre, Spike Island, MUMA, the Venice Biennale, and more. Alongside making work, the artist teaches in the Department of Art at UCLA. Her new commission in London, g/hosti, unfolds as something both intimate and monumental. Visitors move through the visually lush landscape of brushstrokes and textures as if entering the layers of a painting. To learn more about the new commission and Lin’s life in Los Angeles (though she’s currently in Berlin), Something Curated’s Keshav Anand spoke with the artist.

Keshav Anand: Labyrinths are so loaded with metaphor. What made you decide that g/hosti should take this shape, and how does this format help you explore the ideas you broach in your work?

Candice Lin: Originally, the idea I proposed to Whitechapel came from a dream I had where I was looking at an art exhibition with my friend and protecting her from this sharp metal blade that would pass at head height every so often. At the end of the dream, I had this revelation that we had been inside a giant clock the whole time without realising it. I was captivated by the idea of creating an installation where the focus is on something intimate and detailed, where you can tell something else is happening, but you cannot get outside the frame of your experience to understand fully what is going on. It felt like an embodiment of the experience of life, and particularly life within the last two years and all the horror and crisis that have happened during that time period. When the clock idea was no longer feasible to pursue, I started to think about other forms this could take, and ones where the reference to disorientation, a shift in perspectives, and a sense of time were still present.

A labyrinth made sense because of this feeling of being inside something one cannot see the full picture of, and because of the way historically labyrinths were spaces where monks and nuns would walk as a form of meditation and prayer and reflection, and the goal was not necessarily to find the exit or centre but to embrace the process of meandering and the delayed resolution. In my labyrinth I wanted there to be a sense of both curiosity and foreboding, pleasure and disorientation, grief, humour and a range of feelings elicited from the painted images and the hand-drawn animations.

KA: The stop-motion animations in the installation are small, feeling intimate, tucked away throughout the space. Why that scale, and how do you hope viewers engage with these moments?

CL: The animations help draw the visitors into different pathways, as they are staggered in terms of when they come on and off, and the sound and moving image, though small, are in contrast to the collaged, painted imagery and painted walls. Often they are held by a painted puppet-like paw or skeleton hand, and seem to be witnessing something on the other side of the labyrinth wall beyond what is visible to you, or showing you something that was witnessed just a little while ago.

The animations were made in the last year and a half and are a kind of journal of recent times. Many of the sound files are drawn from recordings on my phone or from recordings others made and posted online. They are hand-drawn on paper and scanned, or hand-drawn digitally and animated. There was something about the slow process of drawing something for animation that also felt like a meditation, like the labyrinth in itself, a delayed resolution, because it is about 360 drawings for just 30 seconds (and there are seven animations about 30 seconds to one minute each). As I was drawing imagery that was often very emotional over and over, something would happen inside me. There is something about staying with an emotional or difficult image that feels like an homage or testimony to everything that is going on in the world, especially in this day and age where the images flick so quickly across our screens and eyes.

It was important to me that the animations were shown on phone screens because the phone reference is important. I was thinking about the act of witnessing in relation to historical acts of religious pilgrimage in Europe, where pieces of glass or mirror were held up in front of a saint’s bones to absorb the aura and experience of having been in the presence of this saintly relic. I think similarly we take so many hundreds of photos we never look at again (of places we travel or food we eat); it is more the act of absorption or acquisition, the use of the phone to note the experience we are having.

There is also this act of witnessing that is very distinct from this acquisitive use of the phone, which is the gesture of taking out one’s phone as a call to accountability. For example, citizen watch groups in the US filming masked ICE agents arresting people without warrants or due process, to let them know they see and protest against the brutality they are witnessing, and that there is a record now absorbed by their phone that holds that person accountable for the wrongful acts they have done to another human being. It is effective enough that these ICE agents have become enraged by this act, attacking and arresting citizens daring to challenge them by recording them.

I have also been thinking about what it means to witness what people have been calling the first live-streamed genocide (in Gaza), and the fact that despite seeing so many images of atrocity, the genocide and starvation are still ongoing. The power of images circulates differently now, much because of our phones and their ever-presence in our lives. I have been trying to think about that in relation to other images in the past, like the image of the girl Phan Thị Kim Phúc, who was burned with napalm during the Vietnam War and whose horrific image has been written about extensively for its influence in fuelling the anti-war movement. I have been wondering, as many others have, why images like these no longer move us in the same ways.

The cognitive dissonance of how we experience these images online juxtaposed with cat memes is also something that the animations attempt to portray, as they lead viewers through a range of feelings similar to what one might feel normally when scrolling the internet.

KA: I noticed the ouroboros shows up prominently in one of your animations – what does this symbol mean to you?

CL: The ouroboros is present as a symbol in one of the animations where it breaks apart into a shower of bones which fall and become the living bodies of student pro-Palestinian protestors on campus. The presence of this alchemical symbol is meant to think about cycles of change and transformation that follow political cycles of violence, fascism and repression, with grassroots people’s movements for liberation and freedom. I think a lot in my art about the ways we repeat the things that culturally we cannot quite face and confess to. These become our sociological ghosts and demons (referencing Avery Gordon here) and give rise to figures who use the power within these ghosts and demons, and the anxieties they cause from not being reckoned with, to their own advantage to rise to power. We see this happening now with Trump in America as well as in other nations where right-wing extremist thought is growing strong. But I think it is important also to remember that when the snake comes to eat its tail and destroy itself with its fascism, there will also be a new cycle of people to fight it with beauty and courage.

KA: Can you talk about the materials you have used in this new work?

CL: I wanted the labyrinth to feel very immersive and architectural but also to feel very visibly constructed, a makeshift illusion, not something structural but flimsy enough to rip apart. I also wanted it to feel very colourful and lush, where one could be sucked into the pleasure of colour and texture the way I am when I look at painting or glaze on a ceramic. Painting and drawing are things I always return to when I am more emotional or need to process my feelings. It comes from a very intuitive place, and I often understand my feelings best through making images of animals. I made a long roll (1.5 metres x 25 metres) of paintings and cut and collaged them into the labyrinth, certainly my longest painting ever. But because I am a bad businessperson, of course I ruined their value as paintings by cutting them up and gluing them onto non-archival cardboard. But the cardboard was important as a material that referenced childhood, DIY construction, protest signs, and this familiar, accessible material we use daily.

I was also very happy that the wonderful Whitechapel team agreed to make the paint for the cardboard backdrops using my homemade recipes, as I make almost all of the paints I use in the studio, often with pigments I find or make from rocks or dye ingredients. They were very good-natured and made the casein paint from scratch, and because it is a milk-protein-based pigment, it starts to smell a bit like poo and spoiled milk when it gets old and ferments. So while we were in the last week of install, we got a lot of people coming up to the top floor and wrinkling their noses like, “What is that smell?” There is a faint whiff of it in the installation, but it has faded and smells kind of barnyard in a subtle, sweet, nice way now. Unlike my past work where the material is often the focus of the artwork or research around the artwork (such as my past installations on cochineal, porcelain, bone-black pigment, lithium, iron or manganese), casein was mostly chosen for aesthetics because I like the sheen it gives, which is very different from the plasticky look of acrylic. And there are a lot of cats in the installation, and cats like milk. Or so they say, although Roger [Candice’s cat] is quite indifferent to dairy.

KA: You have previously utilised living materials like mould, bacteria and ferments. What is it about these substances that draws you to them, both conceptually and physically?

CL: Yes, around 2012–2014 I was thinking a lot about our interspecies entanglements with other species, including bacteria, and the microcosmos and macrocosmos of living that our bodies are. These interests fed into a larger framework of reading and thinking I was doing around the construction of the Western Enlightenment sense of self in relation to colonial endeavours and colonial relationships to borders, pathology, hygiene and disease. I was using materials like bacteria to talk about these histories in my work. The act of fermentation was interesting to me both as a craft I did alongside my art practice that gradually melded and became one with my art practice, and it made sense conceptually too to think about acts of fermentation, metabolism, indigestion and digestion in relation to colonial histories and contact between different cultures.

KA: I would love to hear about a day in your studio in Altadena. How do you balance teaching, research and your own practice?

CL: During the teaching year from October to mid-June, I only get about one day a week in the studio, less during February when we review applications. So I work on small things during that time: drawings, sketches, small ceramics. I do most of my larger installations or sculptures during my summer break. This year was the first year since starting my full-time teaching job at UCLA in 2018 where I have been able to be away for a substantial amount of time (April to December) through a combination of sabbatical and unpaid leave to allow me to do my fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, where I am now. It is very hard, honestly, to balance the full-time teaching job, even though I love my students and am constantly inspired by them. It is not just teaching my classes and mentoring students, but also many hours a week of committee and service work. Every year it feels a bit unsustainable to keep making art at the pace I have been and maintain this job, especially now that I see the European model and how the teaching demands seem to be a lot less here.

KA: Are there any artists, writers or thinkers you have been returning to recently, whose work has influenced the way you have approached g/hosti?

CL: I was returning a lot to Yoko Tawada’s short stories in Where Europe Begins because of the sense of familiar disorientation and a kind of intimate alienation in them, as well as the poems by my friend Lucy Ives, who wrote for the catalogue. After I started making some cardboard figures, I remembered seeing some amazing works by James Castle way back in 2015 at the Encyclopaedic Palace Venice Biennale, so I got a book of his. I was also thinking about images you could eat instead of look at, and was looking back at this old book I have, Altered and Adorned, about printmaking intended to be modified and used in one’s daily life, including these “pictures for eating” that were taken to fortify oneself against illness and sometimes even fed to one’s precious cow or horse. There is one edible drawing in g/hosti, but the others ended up going to a different show and are now in someone’s stomach.

KA: Talking of edible works, outside home, where are your favourite places to eat in Los Angeles?

CL: My favourite place to eat near my home is a Thai restaurant called Miya, and I was so happy it survived the Eaton fire and recently reopened. Before I left town, I was going there multiple times a week and am looking forward to eating their food when I go back. I also really love the banh mi and soup at a place called Yummie Restaurant in Chinatown near my studio, and a ceviche spot a little further east called Correa’s Mariscos & Cocina; they have the best aguachile and ceviche.

KA: And finally, what are you currently listening to in the studio?

CL: I listen to a lot of audiobooks and recently just finished Bora Chung’s Your Utopia and Cursed Bunny – both so good and perfect for the images I was painting for the labyrinth. I also listened to N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy for the third time, and it was nice to hear the audio version of it, which is read quite theatrically and really brings to mind vivid imagery when painting.



Candice Lin: g/hosti is on view at Whitechapel Gallery until 1 March 2026.



Feature image: Candice Lin, g/hosti, 2025. Installation Photography, Whitechapel Gallery. Photo © Above Ground Studio (Matt Greenwood)