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林从欣：以批判性虚构重写历史与欲望的交织
林从欣：以批判性虚构重写历史与欲望的交织
美国艺术家林从欣（Candice Lin）的创作根植于她对文化历史的研究与多重媒介的实验，制造出的是挑动感官的环境。她于UCCA陶美术馆当前展览“水底火焰”中呈现的委任作品《世界魂灵（铁衔尾蛇）》[Soul of the World（Iron Ouroboros）]是以陶土制成的环形装置，中空的陶瓷龙身形似宜兴的传统龙窑，暗红的展览空间内时常雾气弥漫，如同窑炉。艺术家了解到在地材料紫砂的色泽来自矿料中含有的铁，以此从人体与地质中共有的铁元素出发，并在作品意象里融合文学中铁带有的关于抵抗的意涵，构筑出仪式般的场景。
林从欣近年来以不同的矿物元素为线索，追溯人类身体与非人物质、跨国贸易与生态平衡间的冲突与妥协。她在上一届悉尼双年展中呈现的作品《我通过肛门呼吸（夜石）》（I breathe through my anus (night stone)）关注的是锰矿的开采与从澳大利亚至中国的海参贸易：锰金釉陶瓷船在一张唱片般的圆盘上不断旋转，装置中的音频同时播放着海参因接触了泄漏的锰而改变性征的虚构叙事。她在纽约Canal Projects的展览“工厂里的锂性恶魔”（Lithium Sex Demons in the Factory）则关于锂这一用于科技和瓷釉的物质，其讲述了锂工厂中的性魔（sex demon）与女性劳工的酷儿爱情故事。在艺术家所写的小说中，恶魔以锂作为时间旅行装置回到人类世界，在被马来萨满驱魔之时唤起关于爱人的记忆。金属元素的效用，尤其是毒性，在林从欣描绘的多重时空中成为转化的中介，渗透身体、性别、物种的边界。
从艺术家2022年在伯克利艺术博物馆与电影档案馆的展览“渗出、腐烂、静置、滴落”（Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping）开始，非人动物逐渐在林从欣的创作中占据主要位置。她吸收不同文化中的鬼怪故事与神话传说，以怪诞（grotesque）形象挑衅那些被遮蔽的或是不可说的欲望与历史——它们可能关于对他国与异族的构想，或许也是被视为禁忌的物种关系。在她的作品中，周身缠绕着不同动植物的陶瓷异兽是中国古代镇墓兽的变体；其影像与装置中反复出现的恶魔则常常是半猫半人的形态。林从欣的猫Roger是她在爱丁堡的塔尔博特·莱斯画廊（Talbot Rice Gallery）的展览“动物丈夫”（The Animal Husband）中的主角：Roger现身于不同影像之中，在自语里反思人与动物过于亲密的伦理关系。动画影像中的叙述超越了人与伴侣物种之间的常规交流，处于令人不适的边缘，却也映照着自然古怪的本质。
林从欣总是将目光投向易被侵入的身体与脆危的生态系统。她以往的研究关于植物、昆虫、细菌如何纠缠人类，帝国剥削与殖民贸易又如何干扰自然。但这些过程并非闭环，而是相互交织、彼此影响。鸦片、胭脂虫、用作药物和染料的靛蓝（Indigo）都曾作为商品跨越洲际；这些自身容纳着复杂历史的材料也成为艺术家创作中的成分。林从欣常用靛蓝染成的布料制作装置；在UCCA陶美术馆的展览中，悬挂于空间上方的两件织物作品也由靛蓝上色，双面各织有不同的单词：其中一张为“恐怖”（Terror）与“风土”（Terroir），另一张则分别是“欲望”（Desire）与“Mater”——即“母体”（Matrix）的拉丁词源，意指人类对地球上物质的渴望滋生暴力。
艺术家对于毒性与污染、种族与染疫的研究也如同一种预言——构思于疫情前、2021年在广东时代美术馆落地的展览“猪仔叹与毒物赋”在对过往瘟疫的回顾中，遭遇历史的重演。林从欣作品中不断出现的“毒物”，如草药、染料与酊剂，透过身体的孔隙协助梳理物质与历史间错综的联系。艺术家曾将蒸馏过的尿液浸泡在植物汤剂中、泼洒在陶瓷上，使其开裂生菌，甚至长出蘑菇，如同对“纯净”这一幻想与暗喻的抵抗；她也曾将自制的酊剂混入制雾机，在展厅内散出、隐秘地进入人体，也意指万物易变的脆弱界限。她的阅读与写作也在档案与神话之间游走，暴力掺入幽默，污秽混杂爱恋。这些混合的模式看似“不洁”（impure），实际是对自我封闭与所谓纯粹状态的质疑，毕竟我们与非人之间是多孔的、彼此感染与缠扰的关系。
Q：《世界魂灵（铁衔尾蛇）》的创作灵感是否与你在宜兴的考察经历有关？为什么选择龙的形态构建这一装置？
A：在三月拜访宜兴时，我想去了解当地的陶泥——紫砂。我得知是铁元素赋予了这种陶泥紫红色，还有它能够在不上釉的情况下仍然保持坚固的特性，所以在这次的作品中，我想关注铁这种既被用于陶瓷也被用于工业流程的矿物。我们也参观了宜兴的传统龙窑，这种窑像龙的鳞片一样延伸向上的方式和早期用于冶铁的土炉都激发了我的兴趣，所以我想做一件参考龙窑和炼铁炉的作品。龙的形态最初是来自蛇。我想到了很多关于蛇和龙的神话，它们象征着转化和再生。即使是在混乱与毁灭之中，事物也会复苏；时间并非是线性的，而像是一种循环，衔尾蛇也是这一概念的一种象征，它同时也是西方炼金术中的重要符号。
Q：可以展开讲讲对于衔尾蛇这一意象的兴趣来源吗？作为此前创作脉络的延续，你会把它解读为这件作品中象征“转化”的标志吗？
A：在我与艺术家P. Staff合作《荷尔蒙雾》（Hormonal Fog）时，我们读到了科学家奥古斯特·凯库勒（August Kekulé）的故事，他尝试弄清楚苯的化学结构，这与芳构化（aromatization）有关，芳构化也影响一些植物改变性别的阶段。凯库勒看到了衔尾蛇的幻象，并由此推导出苯环的六边形结构。我喜欢这个例子，因为在其中科学并不完全是理性的，也有获得神秘启示的时刻。我想我的很多作品都包含某种神谕的或神秘的符号，所以我会在创作时想到衔尾蛇。
在《世界魂灵（铁衔尾蛇）》中，我没有从性别或是荷尔蒙的角度出发，而是更多地思考气候变化和社会政治局势，因为它们带来了太多的混乱和破坏——比如加州的山火、加沙的种族灭绝以及美国和其它地方的学生抗议运动。我在洛杉矶当老师，这对我如何思考当下发生的事情和它们与历史的联系有着重要的影响。我想，尽管世界看起来像是到了末日，局势真的很糟，但仍然有反抗和创造新事物的可能。铁也是抵抗的象征，这个意象取自兰斯顿·休斯（Langston Hughes）的诗《死去的孩子》（Kids Who Die）。这首诗讲的是民权运动时代，与当下的境况非常类似。“铁”比喻的是人民的意志或是年轻人拥有理想主义，反抗并改变现状的力量。在我的学校里，我们为那些因抗议而受到处分、无法拿到毕业证书的同学们举办了一次毕业典礼，其中一名学生在演讲中读了那首诗。在制作这件装置时，我一直在思考关于铁的问题，诗中的一句始终萦绕在我的脑海里：“死去的孩子就像人民血液中的铁——而年长的和富有的人不想让人民尝到死去孩子的铁，不想让人民意识到他们自己的力量。”
Q：雾在你的一些装置作品中反复出现，你怎么看待雾在你作品中的意味？
A：我在之前的作品《荷尔蒙雾》中使用了草药荷尔蒙，它旨在让观众意识到身体的多孔性——当你吸入它时，身体就会发生变化——这种变化经常发生在我们身边，但我们并不总是能意识到。在这次UCCA陶美术馆的展览中，拱形窗户和红色的光就像窑炉门，而雾在光下呈现出红色，像蒸汽、火焰和龙吐出的热气。它的呈现更具戏剧性。
手机屏幕上呈现的动画内容中有很多警察和学生的影像，常常伴随着大量的催泪瓦斯。我也在思考这些时刻的模糊和不明确感，以及历史本身的迷雾。如果龙代表的是历史的某种循环，当你身处历史之中时，你就无法从一种内在的视角看到全局。你置身其中，一切被遮蔽，只能从某一个角度去看。我坚持使用这些小尺寸的手机屏幕来播放动画，也是在反思我们日常是如何通过手机屏幕这种带有亲近感和距离感的媒介获取新闻并见证全球发生的事情。我希望人们在普通的手机看到动画，就像它被丢在地上遗弃了一样。在观看这些屏幕时，可能会有雾突然出现，使你看不清画面。所以，雾也代表了在全球范围内见证新闻事件时的迷失感——我们并不总是知道该如何应对。这个装置意在记录过去一年半发生的事件，同时也是重现在这些事件中感受到的迷失和压迫。
Q：你经常在作品中使用陶土，这种兴趣是如何产生的？你会如何看待陶土的物质性？
A：我对陶土产生兴趣是因为它与身体的关系。陶土常常与身体性的语言相关联，比如“瓷体”“陶体”（clay bodies），它也带有关于种族身份的暗示，几乎像是人类身体的替代品。陶土在科学史上也曾被用于研究细菌，瓷器也曾被用作过滤器，我觉得这非常有趣。我常说，我喜欢陶土作为时间旅行装置的功能，因为当你制作它时，你实际上是在做与地球自然过程相反的事：你将陶土——由天气分解的石头和曾经存活的有机物质——通过窑中的火焰转化回石头，就像地心压力所做的那样。
Q：你经常将来自不同故事中的元素交织在一起，以此为参考在作品中创造混合生物。你如何看待神话、民间传说，或是虚构在你的创作中的意义？
A：对我来说，有几个不同的答案。我在2020年做了一些与中国镇墓兽相关的陶瓷，这些生物是半人半魔，通常踩在不同的动物和魔鬼身上。我对这些形象以及它们与早期欧洲怪物的关系很感兴趣。在欧洲和中国的记载中，对不同种族的人的描述通常通过与动物的相似性得到展现。在我们没有种族概念之前，人们通过动物来描述差异，例如约翰·曼德维尔（John Mandeville）在描述一个亚洲海岛上的人们时，提到他们有狗头。我感兴趣的是人类与动物之间的分类如何变得模糊，并成为讨论文化差异的一种方式。
我也对讲故事感兴趣。我构建的很多生物并不具体，因为我并不是要重述一个特定的神话，而是赋予那些可能存在但未知的过去一个实体，这个想法与学者赛蒂亚·哈特曼（Saidiya Hartman）的批判性虚构有关——如何谈论或写下那些未被记录的东西？如果历史是由掌权者记录的，那么不在权力中心的人永远无法完整地进入档案。对我来说，讲述与虚构是为了让那些历史记录中未曾存在或无法存在的东西呈现为真实的体验。
Q：你提到语言中我们如何将人描述为动物，动物成为一种隐喻。学者陈元青（Mel Chen）也曾在其书中谈及有生性（animacy）与物种分类在人类语言中的体现。
A：陈元青的观点揭示了有生性等级的缺陷，其中那些强调男性、健全和人类优先级的主导观念显露无疑。我感兴趣的是对这些等级制度以及由这些价值观无意识地塑造的生活方式产生的质疑。质疑时间的线性观念——这种关于向前推进、进化的观念——是一种建立在欧洲启蒙运动基础上的自由主义幻想，但通过质疑这一前提并回到时间循环往复的观念中，我们可以学到很多。
Q：你会如何构建去等级化的叙事？
A：我觉得这更依赖直觉。在我写作时，我让图像自然而然地浮现，然后再去厘清它们。也许这就是去等级化的表现，因为我并不试图控制它。我认为尝试去进入不同的视角也是一种想象自己脱离人类的方式。我的小说《我作为锂性恶魔的生活》是从一个曾经是人的魔鬼的视角来讲述的，但它非常困惑，已然忘记做人的感觉，让我们假定为人的经验变得不再熟悉。我在关于锰的作品《夜石》（Night Stone）中讲述了澳大利亚早期原住民与商人从印尼到中国进行海参贸易的故事。但我并没有把故事局限于在这一历史背景中，而是围绕一群雌海参创作了一个虚构故事，她们在一艘印尼贸易船倾覆后摄入了锰，这种有毒的物质导致她们分裂成许多生命体，并以此作为一种抵抗方式。很多时候，我尝试思考动物或细菌如何为存在于世界中提供一种替代性视角或生存方式。
Q：你如何看待作为媒介的文本？它为作品提供某种背景信息，还是像一种“召唤”？
A：我认为文字是我构建心理空间的一种方式，我试图在其中想象、栖息，并创造一种体验。有时候，人们参观展览但并不想读文字，而只想感受作品带来的感官体验，这完全没问题，但文字就像是一种深入我的特定世界的方式，同时也是一种对他人的邀请。不过，你也可以只参观装置作品，并对这个世界有你自己的解读。
Chen: What inspired you to construct the installation Soul of the World (Iron Ouroboros) in the form of a dragon?
Lin: My show Lithium Sex Demons in the Factory at Canal Projects in New York was about lithium, and after that, I did an installation for the Biennale of Sydney (later traveling to MUMA and Jameel Arts Centre), Night Stone, that was looking at manganese.
When I visited Yixing in March, I wanted to learn about the local clay, Zisha. I learnt that the iron gives the clay its purple, red color, as well as the fluxing properties allowing it to remain unglazed but strong. So I wanted to focus on iron as the main mineral that's used in ceramic but also in industrial processes.
When I visited Yixing, we went to see the traditional dragon kiln. I was thinking about the way it goes up in chambers, like the scales of a dragon. I was also interested in early earthen furnaces used for iron smelting, so I want to make something that referenced both an iron furnace and a dragon kiln.
The dragon form also started out as a snake. I was thinking a lot about the mythology of snakes and dragons as being symbols of transformation or regeneration. Even out of chaos and destruction, things come back, time is not linear but like a circle. The ouroboros, the snake eating its tail, is also a symbol of this concept. It’s also a Western alchemical symbol.
Chen: Could you elaborate on your interest in the symbol of the ouroboros? Would you see it as a symbol of transformation in this work?
Lin: For the collaboration with P. Staff on the work Hormonal Fog, we were reading about the scientist August Kekulé, who was trying to figure out the chemical formation of benzene, which is related to aromatization, a stage where certain plants change gender. Kekulé had a vision of an ouroboros, and from that, he was able to figure out the hexagonal shape of the benzene ring. I liked this example where science is not rational, but has a mystical moment. So the ouroboros came to my mind.
I think a lot of my work has some kind of oracular or arcane symbols. In Soul of the World (Iron Ouroboros), I'm thinking about the work not in terms of gender or hormones, but more about climate change and the sociopolitical landscape, which has so much chaos and destruction—like the the wildfires in California, the genocide in Gaza, and the student protest movements in the US and elsewhere. I'm a teacher in Los Angeles, which played a big role in how I was thinking about things happening now and their relationship to history. I was thinking that even though the world seems like it's ending and things are really bad, there is still the possibility that you can resist and make something new.
The iron is also a reference to the resistance. It comes from this poem Kids Who Die by Langston Hughes. It's talking about the Civil Rights era, which is very parallel to now. It's about the iron being this metaphor for the will of the people or the strength of young people to have idealism and fight back and change things.
On my college campus, we held an alternative people's commencement, like a graduation for our students who were getting disciplined because they couldn't get their diplomas from the university that was punishing them for protesting. One of the student speakers gave a speech, and she read that poem. There is a line from the poem that stayed in my mind when I was thinking about iron in making this installation: “the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people–and the old and rich don’t want the people to taste the iron of the kids who die, don’t want the people to get wise to their own power.”
Chen: You often use clay in your work; I wonder how you get interested in clay and how you see the materiality of clay?
Lin: I got interested in clay because of its relationship to the body. It’s often described in the language of the body, like “clay bodies” and, specifically with my past work on porcelain, its material qualities around color, and as being hard and superior. There's a language of racial identity, almost like a human body surrogate, in the way you talk about clay. Clay was also used in scientific history where porcelain specifically was used as a filter for studying bacteria and I thought that was really interesting.
I always say that I like how clay functions as a time travelling device, because when you work with it, you're doing the reverse process of what the Earth did. Where you take clay, which is stone decomposed by weather mixed with organic materials of former living bodies, and then through the fire in the kiln you transform them back into stone, just like the pressure at the Earth’s core.
Chen: You’ve featured fog in several of your installations. How do you see the role of fog in your work?
Lin: My previous work Hormonal Fog had herbal hormones in it. It was about making visitors aware of the porosity of the body—when you breathe it in, your body is changed. That's always happening when you're in the world but you don't always think about it.
In this exhibition at UCCA Clay, the arched window with the red light was like the door of a furnace, and the fog would look red in the light, so it would be more like vapor, fire, and the heat of the dragon. It was intended more theatrically.
If you look at the content of the animations, there's a lot of images of police and students and often a lot of tear gas. So I was also thinking about the fogginess and lack of clarity in those moments, as well as the fogginess of history itself. If the dragon represents a kind of cycle of history, when you're inside history, you can’t see the big picture from your embedded perspective. You're just inside, and it's kind of obscured, you are seeing it from one angle. My insistence on using these tiny phone-sized screens to play the animation was also about reflecting on how we get our news and witness things happening globally through the intimacy but also the distance of a phone screen. They suggested that I use a nicer screen, but I said, no, I wanted people to see the animations on a normal phone, lying in the dirt like it got dropped and left behind. You might be watching one of these screens and then the fog comes in, and you can't see the image. So the fog is also about the sense of being lost in the inundation of witnessing things happening on a global scale, and not always knowing what to do about it. The installation is meant to be a record of the events of the last year and a half but also the experience of being lost and overwhelmed within what is happening.
Chen: You often invent hybrid creatures in your works, weaving together references from different mythologies. What do folklore, mythology, or fabulation mean to you in your practice?
Lin: For me, there's a couple of different answers. I made some ceramics in 2020 that were related to Chinese funeral guardians (镇墓兽). They are half human, half demon, usually stepping on different animals and demons. I was interested in these figures and the way that they were related to early European monsters. In both European and Chinese accounts, there was a way the foreigner was described through their animal-likeness. I was interested in the way that before we have a language of race, people describe differences through animals. For example, the Chinese word for white Europeans was “dogface barbarian” and John Mandeville’s account of people on an island off the coast of Asia was to describe them as having heads of dogs. I was interested in how species categorisation of human and animal become blurred as a way of talking about cultural difference.
I’m also interested in storytelling. A lot of my creatures are not specific, as I'm not trying to retell a specific mythology but rather give reality or physicality to a past that most probably existed but maybe isn't known. This idea relates to the scholar Saidiya Hartman, who talks about critical fabulation—how do you speak about or write about what is not recorded? If history is recorded by the people who have power, those who are not in power are never in the archive in full ways. I think for me storytelling and fabulation are about bringing into existence something that didn’t exist or couldn’t exist in historical records but was a lived experience.
Chen: I found it interesting that you mentioned how we describe people as animals in language, where animals become a metaphor. In their book, the scholar Mel Chen also talked about how we rank animacy linguistically and how we categorize other species through language.
Lin: Mel Chan’s idea reveals the faultiness of the animacy hierarchy, where dominant values that prioritize maleness, able-bodiedness, and humanness are revealed. I’m interested in questioning those hierarchies and the logic that comes out of these values that unconsciously structure our way of life. Questioning the idea of time as linear, this idea of forward progress, evolution, is a liberal fantasy that is grounded in European enlightenment but so much can be learned by questioning this premise and returning to the idea of time as cyclical and circular.
Chen: How would you conceive non-hierarchical storytelling?
Lin: I think it’s more intuitive. When I'm writing, I just let the images come in and try to figure it out afterwards. Maybe that's non-hierarchical, because I'm not in control of it. I think that trying to inhabit different perspectives is also a way of imagining your way out of the human. My Life as a Lithium Sex Demon is in the point of view of a demon who was once a human, but is totally confused and doesn't remember what it was like to be a human, so it defamiliarizes the experience of what we assume is human. The work I did in Sydney, MUMA and Jameel about manganese had a speculative story that connected early Australian First Nation peoples and their trade in sea cucumbers with traders from Indonesia to China. But instead of grounding it in just this history, I created a narrative around a family of female sea cucumbers who ingest manganese when a indonesian trading boat capsizes and they ingest the manganese which is toxic, causing them to split their bodies into many beings as a form of resistance. A lot of the time, I'm trying to think about what animals or bacteria do in the world as alternate perspectives or ways of being in the world.
Yang: I wonder how you perceive text as a medium? Does it like providing the context for a work or as you said, it's like some kind of calling?
Lin: I think the text is my way of building the psychic space of the world I am trying to imagine and inhabit and create an experience of. Sometimes people visit a show and they don't want to read the text but just want to feel the sensory experience of the work which is totally ok, but text is like a way to get deeper into my specific world, but for myself and an invitation for others. But you could also visit the installation and have your own interpretation of that world.