Five beasts, bodies dappled in hues of moss and black, attack a brighter, absinthe-green figure. Stretched lengthwise across a ground of jacquard-woven emerald, the figure is prone, as if they are flying, floating, or have already fallen. Recognizably human and dressed in a loose robe, their face is blank; perhaps they are already dead. Four of the wolves, panthers, lions (perhaps all of the above) gnaw into this luminous, electric body, their arching backs and sinuous tails creating animating radials from the composition’s center. One stands above and apart, a bright green line trailing from its mouth like a loose ribbon. I suppose this is an intestine. I would prefer to read it as a string of pearls, a lost tie for the figure’s coat, but the violence here is undeniable.
The tapestry in question, Papaver somniferum (2019), by the interdisciplinary artist Candice Lin, borrows its title from the Latin name for the classic poppy, a familiar ornamental plant, as well as the infamous source of opium and opiates such as hydrocodone and oxycodone. With this appellation, Lin draws her work into dialogue with the myriad horrors of our present. “There are many ways to die here,” writes Lin in the script for a video from La Charada China, a related work, previously exhibited alongside Papaver somniferum. Although it may not show us the decisive moment of the figure’s death, Papaver somniferum operates as an allegory, drawing together many intersecting processes, an emblem for all the forces that can ravage and pull one apart.
“To dissuade the Chinese from suicide, the overseers would sometimes mutilate the corpses, dissecting, disemboweling, and desecrating their bodies,” writes Lin, of the mistreatment of Chinese laborers (called “coolies”) across the 19th-century Caribbean. These laborers, unpaid or poorly compensated and often illegally conscripted, frequently resorted to suicide as a means of escaping their conditions, dying at a rate one hundred times greater than that reported for their white peers. “The most luxurious form of suicide was eating opium,” Lin describes, drawing the work’s title and its tortuous image together.
In dialogue with the work of theorists Saidiya Hartman and Lisa Lowe, Lin’s textile does historical work, addressing what has been forgotten, giving form to what the archive failed to save, and manifesting now what the popular story yet neglects to say. The fable of Papaver somniferum, an undeniably animal story, evocatively resonates with our present and the many horrors that remain untamed.
Grant Klarich Johnson is a writer, educator, and curator based in Los Angeles.
Papaver somniferum (Tapestry), 2019, is currently on view as part of the exhibition You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestry, at Dallas Contemporary in Dallas, Texas, until October 12, 2025. An accompanying catalogue, featuring texts by Travis Diehl, Grant Klarich Johnson, and curator Su Wu is forthcoming.
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