Baton Rouge, Louisiana—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.
This exhibition is a collaboration between the LSU College of Art & Design, the LSU School of Art, and the LSU Museum of Art. Support is provided by The Winifred and Kevin P. Reilly Jr. Fund and generous donors to the Annual Exhibition Fund. Reception Coke products are provided by LSU Auxillary Services.
UPCOMING PROGRAMS
FOOTNOTE FROM CANDICE LIN: The term “coolie” has very different meanings in different contexts and is an offensive and derogatory term in the Caribbean. The artist would like to clarify her reason for using this term:
In Pigs and Poison, I specifically address the history of coolie labor (and I use this term despite its complex and multivalent meanings in different contexts) to distinguish it from other forms of labor performed by Asian immigrants and to speak specifically about the indentured Asian labor brought in the 19th century to perform the same labor as enslaved or recently emancipated people. It was a specific type of labor that marked the shaky transition between freedom and slavery–a type of labor that is ostensibly free, but has some of the conditions of unfreedom, and was distinctive for its debt-peonage labor contracts and slavery-like conditions of work and living.
I am influenced by two important texts from my research, one is Lisa Lowe's The Intimacies of Four Continents and the other is Moon-Ho Jung's Coolies and Cane. Lowe writes "The great instability and multivalence of the term coolie suggests that it was a shifting, historically contingent designation for an intermediary form of Asian labor, used both to define and to obscure the boundary between enslavement and freedom, and to normalize both. As Moon-Ho Jung eloquently states, coolies 'were never a people or a legal category. Rather coolies were a conglomeration of racial imaginings that emerged worldwide in the era of slave emancipation, a product of the imaginers rather than the imagined."
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ABOUT LSU MUSEUM OF ART
LSU Museum of Art seeks to enrich and inspire through collections, exhibitions, conservation, and education, serving as a cultural and intellectual resource for the University, Baton Rouge, and beyond.
LSU Museum of Art is supported in part by a grant from the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge, funded by the East Baton Rouge Parish Mayor-President and Metro Council. Additional support is provided by generous donors to the Annual Exhibition Fund, members, and community partners. Supported by a grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Office of Cultural Development, Department of Culture Recreation and Tourism, in cooperation with the Louisiana State Arts Council. Funding has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support provided by Art Bridges and Junior League of Baton Rouge. Thank you to the following sponsors of Free Friday Nights and Free First Sundays at LSU MOA: Louisiana Lottery Corporation and IBERIABANK, a division of First Horizon, for sponsoring free admission and Louisiana CAT for sponsoring programming.