The Brooklyn Rail 1x1
Hindley Wang on Candice Lin
Nov 2023
Installation view: Candice Lin: Lithium Sex Demons in the Factory, Canal Projects, New York, 2023. Courtesy the artist and François Ghebaly Gallery. Commissioned by Canal Projects and the 14th Gwangju Biennale. Courtesy Canal Projects. Photo: Izzy Leung.
The height was my height, I thought. I carefully considered the wooden structure that carved out the center opening. Small pieces of ink drawings were tucked in one corner or another, hunching and gleaming. Monsters grimace like cautionary road signs.
I abandoned my hesitation, straightening my spine, ready to poke my head into the center orifice, when I was suddenly besieged with a downpour. Droplets of cold liquid hit the center of my scalp, rushing into my right eye. A thunder broke. I panicked, unsure of the reason exactly: for being caught at the split of my intrusion, or for the entry of this unknown liquid into my system. I retreated back to the red underground to avoid the menace from above, blinking rapidly to rid my eyeball of the liquid that had graced it, as I hunched down to find my knees wet from kneeling. A damp puddle collected in the middle of the enveloping red field, still dripping from the unreliable irrigation.
My eye felt like sand.
I was surrounded with four pots about the height of the space, corresponding to four holes on the ceiling. At the foot of each was a tiny sacrificial offering. I looked to an exit, which could be any direction, and saw an even larger ceramic vessel standing not so far from the outside, with a plastic tube extending out of its body, connecting above its head. The transparency of the tube reassured me, though lack of color is never an indication of purity.
Great timing.
*
Installation view: Candice Lin: Lithium Sex Demons in the Factory, Canal Projects, New York, 2023. Courtesy the artist and François Ghebaly Gallery. Commissioned by Canal Projects and the 14th Gwangju Biennale. Courtesy Canal Projects. Photo: Izzy Leung.Ghost stories are almost all love stories, if not erotics, at least the ones that I know of—mostly from Liaozhai.1 They act as containers for desires that are too toxic, invulnerable as to withstand the bounds of decency or morality, that they might in turn corrode the walls of their temporary containment.
Of societal unrest and poetic justice in the form of fantastical masturbation, a soft self-denial handled fictively.
Of second skin and reincarnation. Melancholia and sentimentalities.2
A classic story that haunted my young memory was Hua Pi: a horrendous ghost that feeds on human hearts is cloaked in the painted skin of a beautiful young woman.3 A young man falls prey to the maiden’s seduction and, despite his wife’s objection, takes the ghost home. The ghost opens the young man’s chest and eats his heart in front of his wife. The wife follows a Taoist monk’s instruction to consume a local madman’s snot and spit to save her husband. She returns home and vomits in desolation and disgust, right into her husband’s open chest, ultimately forming his new heart. He wakes up after two nights. He says he had a strange dream.
I too was horrified and mesmerized when I first read it, perhaps more disgusted than haunted, not sure whether by the deceit or the infidelity, the vomit or the consumption of it.
The ghost figure holds a position outside of the established order: religious, dogmatic, societal, or moral, metaphysically barren yet phenomenologically fertile. In this particular canon, it embodies a queerness in desire and an indeterminacy between appearance and location. The function of the figure is stable: to eject and unsettle. As a narrative device, it promises truth; as a body, it delivers deception and transgression. It fumbles recognition and choice, disrupts the established technology of possibilities. A mutant, irritant, interjection.
The mortal protagonist more often than not occupies a position of surrender, impoverished by his obedience, castrated by morals. This prescribing passivity finds him longing for escape, with an innate impotence to will for something otherwise, an impasse that is interrupted by the ghost. He is victimized by his own fantasy. His encounter with the ghost marks a second life if he is to recover. He tends to return to the normalcy of the regulated order, full of appreciation and gratitude, though not with a better grip on his reality—instead, a more complete discard for his differences, will, or freedom. The satisfaction of a certain craving for life through the vessel of the ghost either leaves him amnesia or derangement.
This ghost, created by Candice Lin, bestowed with the name “Sex Demon,” is the product of an indigestion from a lithium factory. Because they are the only ones who have physical contact with lithium, the ghost is visible only to the female workers. It is also a love story. First published with Triple Canopy, Lithium Sex Demon begins at nowhere:
I came to myself inside a mountain. Or at least I imagined this dark cavern had the kind of exterior one might call a mountain, the same way I imagined my vaginal canal had an exterior one might call a self, or at least a body. For the past three years I had been inside this cavern, waiting for sex to happen.
The exploration of the strange (“sex” and “demon”) unlocks the re-recognition of the self, yet the body is constantly unsettled in the assortment of containing vessels that appear like metaphors.
“Suddenly, while I was rubbing myself on that methane-filled sack of skin and air, it popped. Instead of pus and blood and bone, there was a papier-mâché model of a silkworm.” This silkworm carries a chocolate bar of lithium, wrapped in metallic foils. The demon licks and sees her past self, embarking on a journey of return to the factory.
Five stations stand on two sides of the central architecture: a wooden house elevated from a hollow ground, a shadow gleaming in red, curtained with painted cotton panels. The house, referred to as the “manager’s office,” has a double mirrored window facing the entrance of Canal Projects. The red underground is guarded and adorned with painted panels of demons and motifs, whose architectural function oscillates between doorway and curtain, eclipsing the promise of concealment and the hint of entry. Aluminum ventilator pipes stick out of the stations like intestines, open-ended on the floor. Soft squirms like caterpillars.
The stories are printed on A4 paper, stuck on the back of the metal workstations. Fragmenting the disjunct narrative, the white paper vaguely serves as the backside to the animated videos playing on ceramic monitors on the desks. The first video begins with an animated yellow cat-faced creature waking up next to a vague corpse, like a painted skin or melted clay. Sex is only inscribed on its body in the overabundance of breasts.
The installation is textual, the narrative architectural; yet both are abstract and specific, like the purpose of sex, according to the demon. The orientation of the stations alternates, so you don’t want to walk in a single line interacting with the same medium, but rather thread a piece of text on the back of one station to a video clip on the front of the next. The sense of “direction” is only over-determined by “orientation” in the red underground.
Within each metal cubicle, a clock hangs above the desks—at least the face of it, with crooked handles or paper faces—emblems of time, more dead than alive.
Along the border of the text, the connectivity of events is problematized in the theatrics of alienation staged by the workstations, the assortments of containers in action, automated or shelved bubbling in quiet fermentation. “This river of piss and shit carried me toward the sound of machines and humans.”
The sex demon lands herself in the bathroom stall. She encounters the urshu demon who inhabits the toilet and oversees death and fertility. Urshu licks on used tampons like popsicles and is part of the toilet demon family. Sterility in the factory space breeds fertility in its opposite—a non-place in the interstices of smoke and bathroom breaks—the toilet. A place of escape from the factory clock, all the remainder of humanity left in the paradigm of extraction reside here. This is where the sex demon reunites with her love, Shuyi.
The confusion with her purpose of “sex” is overwritten by a deep memory of an “inscrutable longing”: of “the pressure of Shuyi’s body against my shoulder, her breath as she leaned forward to follow along as I read the words aloud.” The unease of sexuality surfaces as the demon’s memory of abuse from men in the factory returns.
The recurring motifs of smoke and mist on the cotton tarps and illustrations suggest a sensuality whose olfactory remanence is intentionally sterilized, evoked only through words like “licking” hidden in the small texts on the back of the workstations. Sanitation lures, in the medical grade silicone tubes, in the foams generated on the edges of the spinning red liquid stuck in the polishing machine’s high-speed rotation.
The closest station to the stairs plays the final scene of the grand exorcism. The sex demon suffers through a final trial: the bomoh that the factory hired to treat the possessed in the factory.4 On one of the cotton tarps next to the stairs, tucked underneath white totems of birds, rhinos, and floras like a silver lining, the word “quarantine” camouflages and repeats on top of faint scripts reading “different time.” The meticulous pattern depicting a primordial agrarian ideal clouds a reverse exorcism in indigo: a beast hunches on the torso of a corpse, teeth exposed, expelling vomits spotted with spiky bacteria onto the white skull of a dead body—or it could be the other way around. A demon kneels on the right, holding a pitchfork as if cheering, long hair hovering over the exchange below, eyes round with deaden obsession. An active spectator.
In the space of the work, Contact becomes taboo. Missing links, the reason of exposure all become active myths, while time is mastered with sounds, drumming death and romance, expediting the impossibility of love. “Untimely” precipitations pouring from the roofs of the watcher. The elevated platform opens to an empty white box, a black floor with red holes. Yearnings leak from underneath, all shrieking of untraceable sounds from the depth of the sunken shadow.
The intimate circulations and poetic echoes surface the contemporary globalism in lithium—as a target of extraction, a component for ceramic glazing, a catalyst for change in color, an ingredient of energy in batteries, a substance for power in exchange for capital. The discrete circuit of resource, product, work, and display is skinned, laid open here. Labor and its implications are in an overspill, captured in their excess—in the absence of the product or the laborer under the premise of their toxicity—and defined by the split between automation and calculated “er®o®s.” Routine is shuffled. Layered in multiple verses and universes, the installation seeps in self-awareness and reflexivity, as its own manual and installation instructions are left on site: in the file trays or on the sticky notes in the workstations. Along with staplers and burettes holding ceramic funnels. And a paper cup with a shot of espresso, potentially still warm, lid stained with purple lip.
- Liaozhai zhiyi, 《聊斋志异,》 known in English as Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is a collection of Classical Chinese stories by Qing dynasty writer Pu Songling, comprising close to 500 stories. These fantastical folklores explore themes of sexuality and morality, also in part implicit critiques of social injustice and decay around the seventeenth Qing dynasty. Unlike typical horror fictions, supernatural encounters in Liaozhai explore the passionate and powerful emotional entanglements with the world—elevated from the material and mundane reality.
- Dr. Judith Zeitlin deduced that Liaozhai tales provided fertile materials that attest to “an idealization of obsession” that arose in sixteenth century China. In the tales, this romanticized sentimentality (“Qing”/情) usually associated with fantastical attachment to objects, can transcend the boundaries and relations between the object and subject—under the belief that “inanimate and animate things alike, are capable of sentiments.” Zeitlin, Judith T. Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale. United States, Stanford University Press, 1993. P.70.
- Also known as “The Painted Skin,”《画皮.》
- Lin’s story is inspired by the collective spirit possession episodes in young female workers, from multinational factories around the seventies and eighties in Malaysia. In 1971, seventeen cases of “epidemic hysteria” were reported. According to Dr. Aihwa Ong’s research, this symptom of spirit affliction is a result of the social restructuring in Malaysia in the sixties where a huge influx of young men and women from rural areas were introduced to manufacturing plants of multinational corporations. Joining the industrial forces caused complex distress to the female workers, as it was interpreted as a threat to the local Malay order and culture, while the social relations in the factory put them in even more vulnerable positions as their body and sexuality at the disposal of male authorities.