It's a cat's world in new kitty-filled exhibition at Walker Art Center

The feral kitty that artist Candice Lin called White and Gray disappeared one day from the porch and alleys where he roamed near her Los Angeles home.

"He was a really mean cat, and anytime you tried to pet him he'd hit you, for some reason," said the soft-spoken Lin on a recent afternoon at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. "He had a lot of stomach problems, which I talk about in the animation."

A four-minute animation imagines White and Gray's mysterious ending, replete with a group of poker-playing cats, wild poops and a fatal encounter with a slithery reptile. It's located in the corner of an intricately designed tent, made from hand-dyed and hand-printed fabric panels using traditional Japanese techniques.

This is the centerpiece of Lin's solo exhibition "Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping," which can be experienced at the Walker through Jan. 3, when it will travel to Harvard University's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

White and Gray isn't the only kitty in sight. Cats appear everywhere in the gallery — a vehicle for creating an animist approach to the world, which dovetails with Lin's research-based practice focusing histories of materials in relation to colonialism, slavery and migration.

The centerpiece is a nomadic, and possibly sacred, tent structure filled with ceramic cat "pillows" referencing ancient Chinese headrests. The tent is guarded by sculptures that recall the ferocious-looking Zhenmushou tomb guardians from China's Tang Dynasty (618-906 A.D.) and a devil statue invented by George Psalmanazar, an 18th-century European who pretended he was a native of Formosa (present day Taiwan), persuading English intellectuals that Jesuit priests kidnapped him from the "savage" island.

"My main interest is in a lot of these moments of mistranslation, where there is maybe an idea of exotic otherness," said Lin.

That same concept is visible in the indigo designs she produced for the tent structure, which reference Nigerian adire cloth from the early 20th century, when the British ruled parts of western Africa. During Nigeria's colonial period, the ways this cloth was made changed from hand-drawn to stamped and stenciled, and geometric flora and fauna gave way to crowns and other European iconography.

Lin said she thinks about these "moments in history where there is a reckoning of difference, and what happens to the imagery in that moment … the projection of otherness, co-optation of another culture's symbols of power."

Pandemic was an influence

Although Lin started work on the show in 2018, the pandemic influenced the direction it took.

In a participatory 20-minute video animation, a wildly colorful human-cat being guides visitors through a Qi Gong practice — adapted from a video that Lin's parents use to do movement and breathing exercises every evening. Visitors are encouraged to participate by standing on paw prints glued to the floor.

At various points, random memes, aggressive "congratulatory" messages and green text chats appear, jolting the meditative flow.

Walker curator Victoria Sung sees "pandemic realities" built into the work: "Pop-ups when you are trying to focus; spamming text messages; commodification of the wellness industry."

At the front of the gallery, two carved plaster chunks with embedded molds of body parts sit atop tables that are reminiscent of the ones that old men use to play checkers in the park, from a time before breathing together felt worrisome.

Lin also thought about different types of confinement, whether forced or voluntary. "Tactile Theater #1 (after Noguchi)" references Japanese-American artist/architect Isamu Noguchi's time spent imagining contoured, sensory playgrounds for children while interned at a camp in Arizona during World War II.

Lin didn't have access to larger kilns at UCLA, where she teaches, so she produced all this at her home studio.

"The tent was in her backyard," said Sung. "She hand-built all of the ceramics in her backyard, and hand-patterned and drew all the indigo textiles."

These works are meant to be experienced with a partner, a sort of tactile discovery tour.

"Maybe some of my ideas around touch were me being optimistic [about the pandemic] — that we would be done with this," said Lin.

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Candice Lin: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping

When: 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Thu., 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Fri.-Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sun. through Jan 2.

Where: Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place, Mpls.

Cost: $2-$15; free for ages 18 and under and military, and for all Thursday evenings.

Info: walkerart.org or 612-375-7600.