The Brooklyn Rail

The two-person show featuring LA-based artists Candice Lin and Kang Seung Lee at Gallery Hyundai borrows its title, Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me, from D.H. Lawrence’s poem, “Song of a Man Who Has Come Through.” The artists echo each another's practice, and their collaboration both poetically and physically materializes throughout the two floors of the gallery. Lee and Lin’s shared rigor in their research lays the groundwork for the loose weaving and curious wandering the show invites, eliciting participation in the collective practice of remembrance and reimagination.

In the first gallery, traces of queer legacy embellish the wood surfaces of Lee’s ongoing series of works, each titled, “Untitled (Skin, Constellation).” The artist brings together remnants of queer existence through meticulous research and archiving, whether by preserving physical objects or assiduously replicating images of queer lives. The drawings and paintings attached to the panel depict various body parts and features—nipples, folds, scars, wrinkles—suggesting embodiment as an archival practice. To further this point, the wood grains on the support stand as a witness to a tree’s lived experiences, with seasonal changes and natural occurrences such as fungal infection, burls, and knots engraving their marks. The veneer surfaces of the series serve not only as a container of the artist’s assemblage but also as a permeable point of exchange.

In the center, Candice Lin’s Vomit Clock (2025) draws viewers in with the sweet, earthy fragrances of walnut shell, clove, cinnamon, mugwort, and ginger—scents known for their cleansing properties. Alongside her investment in materiality and its sociopolitical and historical implications, Lin created a manganese sculptural piece in the form of a gargoyle. An essential element of human body function as well as a common industrial material found in dry cell batteries, manganese is slightly toxic, and excessive exposure can cause neurological damage. Here, the manganese sculpture drips a cleansing tincture from its mouth, signifying both toxicity and detoxification. The artist calls the viewers’ attention to the ways in which queerness has been pathologized historically through a violent framework of control and fear. Previously, Lin has created works exploring the history of diseases—from researching medieval theories on disease and smell to the racialized discourse around outbreaks of plague in the early twentieth century. Many of her works examine how rhetoric plays a role in creating a narrative of contamination and containment by way of a violent ideological projection onto othered bodies—animal, queer, and foreign.

Nearby, three graphite drawings by Lee reproduce a selection of Peter Hujar’s photography, complex and intimate images of aging, death, and sexuality that represent part of an invaluable archive of the downtown New York queer community of the seventies and eighties. In one of the drawings, Lee retraced Hujar’s photograph of Paul Thek, a fellow artist with whom Hujar was romantically involved. In the original picture, taken in 1967, Thek is sculpting a figure of himself to be included in his installation The Tomb (1967). Interestingly, despite the faithful reproduction of the original image, Lee almost entirely replaced Thek with an atmospheric mass, with only his working hand somewhat discernible. Despite the erasure, Thek is present in the carefully organized studio he inhabited, in the “body” of the work he left behind and in the archive of his community. In various instances, Lee carefully selected and obscured parts of the drawings ever so slightly—noticeable only to those whose gaze will linger long enough—as a nod not only to loss and erasure, but also to the persistent presence of queer legacy.

Lee and Lin suffuse mythology and ghostly presences into their practice, bringing to mind Thek’s 1965 sculpture Hippopotamus Poison. An encased slab of wax, sculpted to resemble rotten meat, its flesh engraved with a conspiracy of “hippopotamus poison” causing a “massacre,” demonstrates the contagiousness of fear. In a simple gesture, Thek reveals the ways in which mythology is deployed to estrange the other, subsequently creating a false sense of impermeability. Created decades before the AIDS epidemic would claim so many lives from those in queer and other marginalized communities (including the artist’s own), the work reveals the way racialized and queer people are othered using mythological narratives to justify the ways in which disease, toxicity, natural disasters, neglect, and various forms of violence disproportionately affect these communities.

Similar themes appear in the “Untitled (Constellation, Skin)” series. Ghost-like images and delicate objects adorn the surfaces of these works, yet, what haunts and draws viewers in is the work’s sparseness. The repetition of materials, from mother of pearl to cast metal, creates continuity throughout Lee’s body of work while alluding to the numerous possibilities for reworking these fragments. As the title “Untitled (Constellation, Skin)” suggests, these assemblages let the eye wander, imagining infinite ways in which these fragments can come together without ever becoming a resolute whole. They invite viewers to sit with the uneasiness and the possibilities of the incomplete, the irresolute.

Intimate in size and mystical in its depiction of pastoral scenes with felines, Lin’s series of paintings further illustrates the permeability of existence. Five horizontal paintings, vertically restrained and tightly framed, break away from the tropes of genre and actively refute romanticizing gazes. Short and dizzying brushstrokes capture humans and nature alike, depicting them as participants in the cycles of life and its violences. In the upstairs gallery, while Feline Messages to the World (2025) imagines the relationship between human and non-human in wondrous and humorous ways, Fertility (2025) serves to mirror the violence subjected to nonhumans and its irreversible impact.

At various points of the exhibition, the works of Lee and Lin reference one another and those in their communities. In Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me (2025), Lee laboriously stitched the title of the exhibition on Sambe, Korean hemp traditionally used to wrap the bodies of the dead. Traced in gold thread, Lawrence’s words allude to the themes of memory, loss, and community shared by two artists. While the subtle erasures in Lee’s charcoal drawings and Lin’s use of mythology and ingestible elements acknowledge the histories marked by loss and erasure, the borrowing of Lawrence’s words here claims the act of citation as a method of collaboration that supersedes temporal and geographic boundaries.

The show suggests various opportunities for ingestion, with Lin’s edible works on paper, taking the form of German Schluckbildchen—devotional images that were believed to have medicinal power when ingested—and two tea cups placed in front of Vomit Clock. Even if one does not participate in the physical ingestion, the show communicates the inheritance of communities, histories, and myths as an active doing and a form of union, much like ingestion. While the artists bring together remnants of marginalized communities, they suggest fragmentation as an invitation to participate in the making and remaking of history, artistic citation as a method of remembrance, and humor and playfulness as a practice in curiosity. The show reveals that every story—of injustice and prejudice, but also of community—is actualized through embodiment. That history—or the wind, in D.H. Lawrence’s words—moves through the body.