(L.A. in São Paulo)
Candice Lin at Almeida & Dale

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Candice Lin, Decomposition (installation view) (2020). Glass, metal, LED light, porcelain, meat paste, and dermestid beetles, 57 × 83 × 10.5 inches. Almeida & Dale, São Paulo, Brazil, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Almeida & Dale.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thousands of Chinese immigrants were forcibly brought to the Caribbean and Latin America to work as laborers following the abolition of Black slavery, the first of many waves of Asian immigration. In Hospitality for Ghosts, Candice Lin’s first solo show in Brazil, the L.A.-based artist explores subjects pertinent to the legacies of this colonial history, such as sugar production by enslaved laborers and the “diasporic figure of the coolie.”¹ The show, hosted by Almeida & Dale in São Paulo, combines porcelain and fiberglass sculptures with audio, videos, and an immersive and interactive installation. Through this varied production, Lin gestures to larger histories of the Asian diaspora in places like Cuba and Brazil, highlighting stories of resistance and hybridity. Lin challenges Eurocentric epistemologies that aim to standardize bodies, cultures, beliefs, and ways of living, in which anyone deemed “other” is categorized as a threat. This path counters colonial logic and leads to broader visions of Brazilian society and its colonial history, bringing the Asian diaspora into relationship with the country’s Indigenous and Afrodiasporic ways of thinking.

Since Brazil has one of the world’s largest communities of Asian immigrants and descendants, Lin’s exhibition invites Brazilian audiences into an urgent and necessary dialogue. Her show is part of Transoceanic Perspectives, launched by Almeida & Dale and curated by Yudi Rafael, the most prominent researcher of Asian diasporic art in Brazil. The research and exhibition project explores the migrant movements and cultural exchanges between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Lin’s show inaugurated the program along with Mario N. Ishikawa’s Archeological Site, a simultaneous adjacent exhibition.

Hospitality for Ghosts took up four rooms at Almeida & Dale. The first room showcased Refined by Fire (2018/2021), an installation in which Lin juxtaposed two antagonistic images: a diagram of a sugar refinery process and an excerpt from “The Cuba Commission Report,” an 1873 petition that reported the abusive conditions endured by Chinese workers in Cuba. Painted on a black wall, white barrels filled with purifying charcoal granules were shown turning “brown” sugar into “white” as part of the refining process, mirroring colonial efforts to culturally whiten invaded countries. The diagram also hints at various chemical procedures performed by the laborers: filtering, decanting, disinfecting, sterilizing, purifying. Across the room, a fragment of the petition, which denounced ruthless working conditions, was printed on a white wall. This portion of the document described deceased workers who were denied the dignity of a coffin or grave. Their bodies were tossed in a pit and their bones were burnt to make lime used to refine sugar. Taken together, these contrasting images tell a striking and unnerving story: Sugar, changed from brown to white, was more valuable than the Chinese workers. Even when they were dead, their mortal remains were violated, their ashes “refined by fire” (as the work’s title illuminates) and reinserted into the production chain. Provocatively, Lin cited these dynamics by mixing a black pigment produced from charred animal bones into the mural paint.

Candice Lin, La Charada China (installation view) (2018). Earth, clay, LED panels, wood, metal, ceramic, various objects, and video (13 minutes and 45 seconds) projected on mylar, dimensions variable. Almeida & Dale, São Paulo, Brazil, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Almeida & Dale.

The installation La Charada China (2018) occupied another room, where reflective film covered pink-lit walls. Visitors were invited to play a dice game on a central clay sculpture while ethereal footage played across the reflective walls. The work’s title nods to a gambling game popular in Cuba, introduced by nineteenth-century Chinese enslaved laborers. According to a booklet about the game included in the installation, visitors can play La Charada China “for money” or “for dreams and spirits.”² Dice could fall through carved indentations in the clay table, which together evoked the shape of an absent human body. Its form recalled the figure printed on the lottery tickets used in this Cuban game, a derogative image of an Asian immigrant with an opium pipe wearing clothing typical of the Qing dynasty.³ By highlighting this game, Lin underscores the blending of Asian influences with Latin American ones, resulting in a contaminated epistemology that resists the European sense of purity.

In a smaller room, lit only by the artwork, Decomposition (2020) comprised porcelain-crafted skeletons of fabulated beings arranged in zoological glass cases and bathed in white laboratory LEDs. These mimetic vertebrae were coated in meat paste, moldering because of the Dermestidae larvae Lin placed inside the cases. In this way, the artist transformed the scientific lab experiment, a symbol of colonial logic and control, into a spontaneous ecosystem of fake bones and larvae that was fascinating to watch. I visited the exhibition twice, and what I remember most was the smell. At the opening, I could see larvae discreetly crawling in the wood chips, and the work emitted a scent that reminded me of wet dog food. Two weeks later, the artwork had metamorphized almost completely. It now had a stinging acidic odor and countless beetles were dwelling inside the porcelain skeletons as if in a natural topography.

The title Hospitality for Ghosts implies a receptiveness to typically feared phenomena.⁴ In embracing hybridity and syncretism, Lin’s exhibition viscerally refused the colonial practices of categorizing, segregating, and purifying. It honored impurity, exploring harmonic possibilities of contamination, and welcoming the haunted as enriching matter.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 36.

Mateus Nunes, PhD is a São Paulo-based writer, curator, and postdoctoral researcher from the Brazilian Amazon.

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