Candice Lin. Vomit Clock.

A ceramic demon, vomiting

Vomit Clock is a ceramic gargoyle in a dark manganese glaze. It is not large, roughly 57 by 40 by 62 centimetres. Gargoyles are the stone demons of European church roofs, built as rain spouts, water pouring from their mouths. Candice Lin keeps that function exactly and replaces the rain.

A pump sitting in a food grade plastic bucket pushes a tincture up through the sculpture and out of the mouth; it falls, and is pumped up again. The loop never stops. The demon keeps vomiting.

The tincture is steeped from walnut shell, clove, cinnamon, mugwort and ginger. It smells sweet and earthy and fills the space around the piece. Lin gave it a half joking, half crude name, a reminder that what is sold as a cleanser can also be named in mockery.

Pearl, silver and a few objects from the collection of Kang Seung Lee, who shares the exhibition with her, sit within the circuit, like things rescued or swept along.

Toxic bodies, clean bodies

The work was shown in Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me at Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, from 27 August to 5 October 2025. The title comes from a poem by D. H. Lawrence. Kang Seung Lee stitched it in antique gold thread onto sambe, the Korean hemp cloth used to wrap the dead.

Both artists look at one history: the way societies use the language of disease to name bodies outside the norm. Queer people, migrants and the poor have all been cast as contagion, as poison to be removed. As Min Park writes in The Brooklyn Rail, Vomit Clock touches this nerve: toxicity and detox, the pathologising of queerness through systems of control.

Vomiting is how a body expels what it judges harmful. Lin has a demon do it forever. Standing before it, the viewer cannot tell who is being cleansed: the demon, the room, or oneself.

The word clock deserves a second thought. There is no dial, no hands. Time here is the pump cycle: up, out, down, up again. A clock that counts in purges.

Pictures you can swallow

In the same space Lin showed horizontal paintings such as Feline Messages to the World and Fertility, both 2025, where humans and animals appear as fellow participants in the cycles of life, its breeding and its violence.

She also made edible works on paper after the German Schluckbildchen: small devotional images that people once swallowed, believing they protected the body. The image goes into the stomach. The remedy is a picture.

Side by side, the edible pictures and the vomiting demon make two directions of one movement. One takes in. One throws out. Between them is the body, where society always wants to decide what may stay.

Smell is often Lin's main material. In Swamp Fat visitors rubbed scented fat onto their skin. In Vomit Clock the smell clings to no one; it spreads through the room and is breathed in without permission. Smell crosses borders. That may be why it suits a work about the borders drawn between people.