Working with substances that range from porcelain, cochineal, and indigo to urine, tobacco, and opium poppies, the artist reveals how these materials provide insight into social hierarchies, cultural values, and cycles of violence throughout history. Her 2020 exhibition, Pigs and Poison, emerges from research into the lives of nineteenth-century Chinese indentured laborers in Britain and the Americas. Identifying materials tied to this history—pig lard for the derogatory term used for Chinese indentured laborers and bone black pigment for the practice of burning dead laborers alongside dead livestock to produce it—she gives the grim reality of firsthand accounts a physical presence. The resulting works, such as A History of Future Contagion (2020) and Flesh Lumps (2020), reflect what cannot be captured in the historical record: the physical and emotional weight of these perceptions and circumstances. “A lot of that, for me, is taking the real or historical aspects but then imagining what are the stories that are lost in the archives,” states the artist. “I use the speculative or fictional aspect of the work to allow those things to come to the surface.” 

Throughout her practice, Lin creates bodily experiences that offer something more than simple explanation. “I started making sensorial installations to think about the porosity of the body; the experience of the work is not primarily visual, you might smell it or hear it before you actually see it,” the artist says. Works like Tactile Theater (2021) or Swamp Fat (2021) engage senses beyond sight, inviting viewers to run their fingers across a concrete slab engraved with topographic and organic forms, or to smell the scent of rotting meat infused in her clay swamp creatures. Lin’s 2017 exhibition, A Hard White Body, examines the moral valuation of porcelain in nineteenth-century Europe as a strong, pure, and white material, which she associates with the language of white supremacy. The work consists of a porcelain bedroom, modeled after the bedroom in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and the ship cabin of Jeanne Baret, a woman who circumnavigated the globe while cross-dressing as a man, which is kept moist using a mist of urine and water from the Seine. Through this work, the artist draws parallels between the supposed purity of the material and fears of racial and sexual contamination.