Decompositional Forms: Asiatic Disfigurement, Sensorial Excess, and Queer Inhumanisms in Candice Lin’s Natural History

Abstract

This article analyzes Candice Lin’s 2020 solo exhibition, Natural History: A Half-Eaten Portrait, an Unrecognizable Landscape, a Still Still Life, a show that reflects the artist’s ongoing enquiry into non-Western botanical knowledge and attempts to develop nontoxic death rituals by building more-than-human intimacies. Merging the biological processes associated with decomposition and the discursive formations of race and gender, the work also interrogates the knowledge systems constructed by museums. I examine Lin’s works through the lens of queer inhumanisms to illustrate how this exhibition challenges modern curatorial practices and historical representations of the Asiatic in natural histories. I refer to this aesthetics of disfigurement as “decompositional forms.” Ultimately, I forward that this method of representation renders Asian American racial form into multisensorial registers (which literally penetrate art consumers) to recognize racial histories beyond identity and alongside the omni-presence of the more-than-human.