Candice Lin: g/hosti

8 October 2025 – 1 March 2026

Free

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.

‘The idea of being lost inside of a painting that is also a labyrinth comes out of many different experiences of the last year and a half: witnessing the genocide in Gaza live-streamed to our phones and the dissonant feelings of grief, shock, guilt at my complicity as an American, and a feeling of smallness and helplessness in the face of such overwhelming inhumane horror. It came from the bureaucratic, disciplinary and insidious way the University that I work for also dealt with the student encampment and the student protest movement through police brutality and the surreal implementation of ‘free speech zones’ and other absurd policies. This has been mirrored in the larger society with Trump’s fascist crackdowns, funding cuts, deportations and denials of due process. It has made me think about nested circles within circles – microcosmos within macrocosmos, endlessly unfolding. There is something profoundly surreal and disorienting about

Whitechapel Gallery presents a new commission from artist Candice Lin (b. 1979, Concord, Massachusetts, US) featuring a spectacular and disorientating architectural installation.

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.

‘The idea of being lost inside of a painting that is also a labyrinth comes out of many different experiences of the last year and a half: witnessing the genocide in Gaza live-streamed to our phones and the dissonant feelings of grief, shock, guilt at my complicity as an American, and a feeling of smallness and helplessness in the face of such overwhelming inhumane horror. It came from the bureaucratic, disciplinary and insidious way the University that I work for also dealt with the student encampment and the student protest movement through police brutality and the surreal implementation of ‘free speech zones’ and other absurd policies. This has been mirrored in the larger society with Trump’s fascist crackdowns, funding cuts, deportations and denials of due process. It has made me think about nested circles within circles – microcosmos within macrocosmos, endlessly unfolding. There is something profoundly surreal and disorienting about going through the motions of daily life while witnessing and feeling the weight of one’s embeddedness within a nation bent on the destruction of others, and the punishment and removal of those that dare to speak out for those others.’ Candice Lin

These ideas are developed further in a series of stop-motion films displayed on phone-sized screens placed throughout the labyrinth. The hand-drawn animations feature mythological animals, groups of people marching, a person caring for another person who is dying and an ‘ouroboros’, an ancient alchemical symbol showing a snake devouring its own tail. Lin relates this symbol to  cyclical time and repeated history. She also considers it a metaphor for the interconnectedness of different scales of loss and destruction – from the personal to the planetary.

‘The animations are on phone-sized screens because I am thinking about the phone as a vector for performative witnessing, the way medieval European pilgrims visiting holy sites would hold up a piece of glass or mirror to the saint’s relics to absorb the aura of the relic, to ‘remember’ the experience of pilgrimage. I have always been haunted by the idea of a fragment of glass becoming a material witness that holds the non-verbal testimony of having seen or felt the aura of an experience. In an era like today where we both film and watch the relentless barrage of images (of genocide, of starvation, of cats dancing, of police violence, of gourmet food, etc.) there is a kind of cognitive dissonance and feeling of being overwhelmed by excess. We do not have a sense of distance or time to process or understand the system we are living within. We are living it, inside of it, shaping and being shaped by it in real time.’  Candice Lin

Lin’s eclectic historic and cultural references are also reflected in a group of sculptural works on display. Among these, a humanoid cat hangs in a crucified position from the ceiling with creatures emerging from boils on its outstretched arms.

The final element of the exhibition is a fairy-tale-like text inscribed in graphite around the outer circumference of the room. Often using visceral metaphors, the text explores Lin’s preoccupations with a haunting or uncanny loss of perspective she observes in the contemporary world. It also unlocks the meaning of the exhibition title ‘g/hosti’, which references ghosts, but also contains the roots of the words ‘guest’, ‘host’, ‘hostile’ and the Old English word ‘gæst’ meaning ‘stranger’.

A fully-illustrated publication accompanies the exhibition and will be published in November 2025. It features writing by Lin, a creative text by novelist and critic Lucy Ives and an interview with the artist.

About Candice Lin:

Candice Lin was born in 1979 in Concord, Massachusetts and now lives and works in Altadena, California. Her multi-disciplinary artwork often engages with marginalised histories, legacies of colonialism and issues of race, gender and sexuality. Through a research-based practice, she investigates the materials and processes that connect contemporary concerns with deeper histories. Her layered installations bring these histories to life with eclectic materials – such as tobacco, lard, opium poppies or cochineal bugs – and with room-sized interventions that choreograph the movements of audiences within her work. Lin received her BA in Visual Arts and Art Semiotics from Brown University in 2001, and an MFA in New Genres from San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. She has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at venues including Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2024); Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, UAE (2024); MUMA, Melbourne, Australia (2024); Canal Projects, New York, USA (2023), Spike Island, Bristol, United Kingdom (2022); and the Times Museum, Guangzhou, China (2021). Lin has also participated in group exhibitions including the 24th Biennale of Sydney (2024), the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), the 13th and 14th Gwangju Biennial (2021 and 2023). She is the recipient of several residencies, grants and fellowships including the inaugural Ruth Award (2024); the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2023); Gold Art Prize (2021); the 6th Arnaldo Pomodoro Sculpture Prize (2021); and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019). She is Associate Professor of Art at UCLA in Los Angeles. 

Notes to Editors:

• Candice Lin: g/hosti runs from 8 October 2025 – 1 March 2026
• g/hosti is new commission from artist Candice Lin (b. 1979, Concord, Massachusetts, US)

Listing Information

Candice Lin: g/hosti

8 October 2025 – 1 March 2026

Gallery 7

Visitor Information

General Gallery Admission: Free
Opening times: Tuesday – Sunday, 11am – 6pm; Thursdays, 11am – 9pm
Whitechapel Gallery, 77 – 82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX
T + 44 (0) 20 7522 7888 | E info@whitechapelgallery.org | W whitechapelgallery.org

Press Information

For more information, interviews and images, contact:

Hannah Vitos, Rees & Co | hannah@reesandco.com | +44 (0)20 3137 8776
Ruby Wroe, Whitechapel Gallery | press@whitechapelgallery.org

About Whitechapel Gallery

Whitechapel Gallery was founded in 1901 with the aim to bring great art to the people of East London. From the outset, the Gallery exemplified a bold programme of exhibitions and educational activities, driven by the desire to enrich the cultural offer for local communities and provide new opportunities for extraordinary artists from across the globe to showcase their works to UK audiences – often for the first time.

From ground-breaking solo shows from artists as diverse as Barbara Hepworth (1954), Jackson Pollock (1958),  Hélio Oiticica(1969), Gilbert & George (1971), Eva Hesse (1979), Frida Kahlo (1982),  Sonia Boyce DBE RA (1988), Sophie Calle (2010), Zarina Bhimji (2012), Emily Jacir (2015), William Kentridge (2016), Theaster Gates (2021), Nicole Eisenman (2023), Zineb Sedira (2024), Gavin Jantjes (2024), Peter Kennard (2024), Lygia Clark (2024), Sonia Boyce (2024) and Donald Rodney (2025) to thought-provoking group and thematic exhibitions that reflect key artistic and cultural concerns, the Gallery’s focus on bringing artists, ideas, and audiences together, remains as important today as it did over a century ago and has helped to cement the East End, as one of the world’s most exciting and diverse cultural quarters.

We are proud to be a Gallery that is locally embedded and globally connected. Its vision, under the current Directorship of Gilane Tawadros, is to ensure Whitechapel Gallery claims a distinctive and radical position in the social and cultural landscape, building on its pioneering history while translating and animating it for our time.

Candice Lin: g/hosti has been generously supported by:

 The Ampersand Foundation

Whitechapel Gallery Commissioning Council

Dorota Audemars

Erin Bell

Émilie De Pauw