Candice Lin review – ‘These fabulations may be familiar to those of us who wince at the triviality of our own lives’

Candice Lin, ghosti, 2025.

Looking for something unusual to do for Halloween?

A new installation at the Whitechapel Gallery by American artist Candice Lin seems designed to jolt us out of complacency with arty gore.

g/hosti is a labyrinth of painted cardboard that depicts a whimsical yet gruesome world: of fairytale cats holding parties and vicious wolves dismembering all that they find.

The allegorical landscape lends itself to multiple interpretations, some of which are hinted at in the script that runs along the outside wall of the space.

Candice Lin, ghosti, 2025

We learn where the work’s title came from: “the word for enemy and guest are both embedded inside the root of host: g/hosti.”

Other sections rely more on viewer imagination: “Nuclear medicine. Blasted. Babies too. Sure, I cried for the babies, but they were not my babies. The danger of strangers is abstraction”.

Short films on phone-sized screens mounted on the cardboard panels add another narrative layer, depicting fires, demonstrations and acts of violence.

These fabulations may be familiar to those of us who wince at the triviality of our own lives spent scrolling and shopping for trinkets while others wreak unbearable harm on our neighbours through hate, violence and degradation.

Are we the cat we see slumbering serenely on the back of a wolf baring its fangs?

Or are we looking at our own dismembered skeleton lounging on the ground?

As the installation script notes: “This is a place for everything and nothing … This is an endless loop where my memories become yours.”

Candice Lin: g/hosti
Until 1 March 2026
Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
E1 7QX