Candice Lin: The Sex Life of Stone

Candice Lin: The Sex Life of Stone is the first Australian solo exhibition by the Los Angeles-based artist.

Lin is recognised internationally for her distinctive use of natural materials and her exploratory and playful approach to silenced histories. The exhibition will present new and recent works that reflect Lin’s investigations into the intersection of climate change, colonial legacies and the politics of power inscribed into bodies and the natural world.

MUMA will present a new installation, co-commissioned with the 24th Biennale of Sydney, exploring speculative and historical entanglements between manganese pigment, industrial mining, historic trade connections linking Asia and Australia and the sexual properties of sea slugs. The work ambitiously extends Lin’s long-time use of ceramics and draws on techniques of Chinese irrigation and water wheels, employing black manganese pigment and gold manganese glaze. Continuing Lin’s exploration of the life of animals and their relationship to the human world, the work evokes an anthropomorphised sea slug reflecting on the effect of manganese pollution on the marine ecosystem, leading to a transformation of its sexuality.

The exhibition will also feature two recent installations by Lin—Lithium Sex Demons in the Factory 2023 and The Animal Husband 2024—introducing Australian audiences to the breadth of her practice.

The exhibition, curated by Pip Wallis, Senior Curator, MUMA, will be accompanied by a newly commissioned short story by Canadian novelist and critic Larissa Lai published as a fold out poster-kite designed by the artist with Žiga Testen and Stuart Geddes.

Artist biography
Candice Lin (b. 1979, Concord, US) is a Chinese-American artist based in Los Angeles. Lin currently holds the position of Assistant Professor of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has exhibited widely including recent solo exhibitions Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2021); The Glittering Cloud, Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2021); and Stressed Herms, Sweat, & Period Gas, Institute of Contemporary Arts, New York University, Shanghai (2020). Selected group exhibitions include the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2022); 13th Gwangju Biennale (2021); MOMENTA Biennale de l’image, Montreal (2021); and Prospect.5 New Orleans Triennial (2021).

Lin has received several grants and fellowships including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019); Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (2017); and the California Community Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship (2014). She has held residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown (2012) and Deutsche Börse, Frankfurter Kunstverein (2010). Three monographs are dedicated to Lin: Pigs and Poison, Mousse Publishing, Milan (2023); Book of Secrets, Occidental College, Los Angeles (2019); and A Hard White Body, University of Chicago Press (2019).

Media inquiries: Rhiannon Broomfield, Rhiannon.Broomfield [​at​] monash.edu.