La Charada China (Tobacco Version) is a sort of portrait. It takes the form of the silhouette of a man cut out of tobacco leaves, which is laid out on a table. Various objects are arranged around him: cacao beans, ceramics, Chinese herbs, opium poppies and a teapot. A tincture of sugar, tea, tobacco and urine etc boils away in a still situated at the level of the abdomen. With her “Chinese Charade”, the 40-year-old American artist and recent winner of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award continues to bring colonial violence to light, evoking here the memory of those people of Asian origin who were forced to come and work on plantations in the Caribbean and South America.
1979 Born in Concord (Massachusetts)
2001 B.A. in Semiotics & B.A. in Visual Arts, Brown University, Providence (Rhode Island)
2004 M.F.A. in New Genres, San Francisco Art Institute (California)
2017-2018 Solo show “A Hard White Body“, Bétonsalon, Paris (France), Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago (Illinois), Portikus, Frankfurt (Germany)
2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation Award
Lives and works in Los Angeles (California)
Photo Ian Byers-Gamber/Courtesy Candice Lin and François Ghebaly.
Photo Ian Byers-Gamber/Courtesy Candice Lin and François Ghebaly.
