Whitechapel Gallery presents a new commission from artist Candice Lin (b. 1979, Concord, Massachusetts, US) featuring an absorbing and disorientating labyrinth.
Candice Lin works across a variety of disciplines and media, including installation, sculpture, painting and video, to create multisensorial environments that tell stories about the historic roots of contemporary political circumstances.
Visitors to g/hosti are plunged into a circular labyrinth made from curved, painted cardboard panels that depict a fantastical world populated by animals and other creatures. The structure towers above head height, while cut-out sections and undulating edges offer glimpses of spaces beyond. Visitors move through the visually lush landscape of brushstrokes and textures as if entering the layers of a painting. Along the way they encounter watchful wolves, tender mice and playing cats – the bright colours, patterns, animal imagery and cardboard materials evoking childhood and play. Yet sinister and sometimes startling images lurk in the detail – including human cadavers that peek out from the shrubbery – creating a relentless environment that threatens to engulf the viewer.
Lin lives in Los Angeles, California, where she developed the work during a period of profound upheaval – notably the inauguration of Donald Trump’s second presidency and the devastating wildfires in her community of Altadena, which coincided in January 2025. Lin is an Associate Professor of Art at UCLA where she continues to witness the ongoing police repression and disciplining of the student protest movement. All these experiences inform the sense of disorientation evoked in the installation.
