Candice Lin’s art explores marginalized histories, colonial legacies and the materials that link them. 
Lin's title refers to the nineteenth-century trade in Chinese indentured laborers—disparagingly called "pigs"—and to opium, or "poison," which in the same period was imported by the British to China and used as both a commodity and a mechanism for controlling the workers who became addicted to it.

Through her art practice, Lin explores legacies of Chinese migration and the interconnected cultivation of crops like tobacco, sugar cane, poppy, and fungi. Lin looks at how the racialized language around plants and their use in parallel narratives of vitality and contamination.
The stories told weave together the Chinese, American, and British colonial specificities to deliver a complex view of lesser-known histories of Chinese migration that have echoes in New Zealand and uncanny relevance today. In particular, stories of borders and segregation; racial profiling and conspiracy theories; bodies and remedies; viruses and war give unsettling historical context for current conditions. 
Lin’s approach to conveying marginalized histories is as varied as the stories themselves, encompassing: virtual reality, sculpture, drawing, and large-scale installation.

Pigs and Poison is published following a major commission and touring 2020-2022 exhibition of the same name, co-commissioned by Spike Island, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and the Guangdong Times Museum.