Candice Lin is an interdisciplinary artist exploring histories of Chinese migration and colonialism who works in Altadena, California. Her work Minoritarian Medicine borrows the term “minoritarian” from French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. “Becoming-minoritarian” is a fluid and continual process of inhabiting positions and perspectives outside and beyond the dominant culture. Applied to the concept of medicine, Lin works with non-pharmacological knowledge including Chinese medicine, naturalist, mystical and other non-Western traditions of healing. She uses the recognizable form of the medicine cabinet, and fills it with cures that have not been accepted, appropriated, or absorbed by Western mainstream medicine. In exploring minoritarian medicines, the work also comments on anti-Asian rhetoric stemming from 19th-century histories of migration and continuing today with the COVID-19 pandemic being labelled a “Chinese virus.”
Minoritarian Medicine is on view at Remai Modern until August 22, 2021, as part of the exhibition An apology, a pill, a ritual, a resistance.
