Candice Lin: g/hosti

Candice Lin’s cardboard labyrinth is at once playful and sinister, conveying the relentless drip-feed of disaster we receive through our pixelated screens as well as more hopeful, mythological tropes

Candice Lin, g/hosti, 2025. Installation view, Whitechapel Gallery. Photo © Above Ground Studio (Matt Greenwood).

Whitechapel Gallery, London
8 October 2025 – 1 March 2026

by SABINE CASPARIE

Candice Lin’s g/hosti (2025) starts cheerfully enough, with a giant, green toad suspended in the air. The toad casts a shadow on the opposite wall, cleverly metamorphosing into the shape of a human with raised arms, jubilant. A painted cardboard wall, curved and just above head height, serves as the frog’s backdrop, its contours shaped like foliage. The almost invisible eyes on the toad’s back should have warned me that this was not going to be a magical forest, but something more sinister.

Candice Lin, g/hosti, 2025. Installation view, Whitechapel Gallery. Photo © Above Ground Studio (Matt Greenwood).

The installation, a commission by the Whitechapel gallery, is set up as a maze, the cardboard walls painted in earthy colours – dark brown, dark green and ochre – curving around the space like the growth rings of a tree. Painted cardboard animals are glued to the walls or attached with wire, while cut-out parts function as openings, letting you glimpse other parts of the installation. There are furry cats hiding behind bushes and an owl is perched on a twig; two grey doves are caught mid-flight as if escaping their cardboard fates. Cute, bright red strawberries the size of apples stick out from the wall, as seductive as the trail of crumbs in Hansel and Gretel. At first sight there is something makeshift, almost amateurish about the installation, like stumbling upon a mis en scène for a local youth theatre production.

Candice Lin, g/hosti, 2025. Installation view, Whitechapel Gallery. Photo © Above Ground Studio (Matt Greenwood).

Again, first impressions are deceptive: this forest is materially and thematically more complex than it seems. The inner walls show cats dancing in the flames and a fox jumping a skeleton from behind, while two tiny rodents watch on from the bushes, eyes wide open. Ominous sounds float through the gallery, coming from five phone-sized screens attached to the walls, each one displaying a stop-motion film. Men chanting slogans are interrupted by the haunting track Born Slippy (Nuxx) from the British electronic music group Underworld (used in the film Trainspotting), the soundscape calling to mind the anti-immigrant riots of recent years. The hand-drawn animations on the phones depict realistic scenes – men marching and setting a train on fire, someone caring for a dead body – but also more mysterious ones: a dancing cat, a fox dissecting a human cadaver and an “ouroboros”, an ancient alchemical symbol showing a snake devouring its own tail.

Candice Lin, g/hosti, 2025. Installation view, Whitechapel Gallery. Photo © Above Ground Studio (Matt Greenwood).

“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),” says Lin, as quoted in the exhibition text, “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.” This living inside is symbolically captured in the labyrinth – I spent at least 30 minutes with the installation trying to take in all the mini-artworks hidden inside, deciphering their array of visual cues. Two cardboard cats are suspended in the air, hinting at giant voodoo dolls or lynchings, their fabric T-shirts and shiny sequinned pants contrasting strangely with their camouflage-patterned paws. It is as if the further we wander into the labyrinth, the closer we get to humanity’s dark heart.

Candice Lin, g/hosti, 2025. Installation view, Whitechapel Gallery. Photo © Above Ground Studio (Matt Greenwood).

Lin, an American-born, Los-Angeles-based artist, was commissioned to make the work during the inauguration of Donald Trump’s second presidency, resulting in student protests at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is an associate professor of art. At about the same time, her community in Altadena was ravaged by wildfires. But Lin’s installation far transcends the local and the specific: forests are disappearing all around our planet, animals threatened everywhere. What Lin’s labyrinth-like form so powerfully conveys is that there is no way for us humans to hide from the protests and wars that, if not happening on our doorstep, are constantly entering our vision. We are inundated with a relentless drip-feed of disaster through our pixelated screens, witnessing the world on fire like all-knowing gods.

Candice Lin, g/hosti, 2025. Installation view, Whitechapel Gallery. Photo © Above Ground Studio (Matt Greenwood).

Lin’s mythical tropes reminded me of other sources: Dante’s Inferno, Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, Francisco de Goya’s Black Paintings, or Utagawa Yoshifuji’s woodblock prints, which, like Lin’s, have felines populating hell. A text written by Lin and inscribed around the outer circumference of the room 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”. It is these elements of fairytale and mythology, and the fable-like qualities of the animals, that give Lin’s installation a certain timelessness, lifting it from social commentary into something dreamier and more philosophical.

Candice Lin, g/hosti, 2025. Installation view, Whitechapel Gallery. Photo © Above Ground Studio (Matt Greenwood).

The maze ends in a small, round “inner chamber”. A woven wall hanging of two skeletons has a pixelated weave that made me think of screens, while also recalling a medieval tapestry. A tiny black-and-white painting of a woman with a cat-face is torn into little strips like the tear-off strips of paper from advertisements in a local supermarket, although I doubt that any supermarket ads will say: “Eat me.” A carved, wooden desk is at once a colonialist object and a school desk, situated in the middle of the “sanctuary” as if waiting to be occupied. I leave the installation thinking about the adults who are making this world a mess, but hopeful that it will be the children who are coming to save it.