Since 2022, Lotus L. Kang has used greenhouses to tan her ‘skins’: great sheets of unfixed, light-sensitive film that she bruises into blues, purples and oranges under the sun. Normally handled in darkrooms or used for advertisements in lightboxes, Kang employs these skins in works such as Molt (New York-Lethbridge-Los Angeles-Toronto-Chicago-) (2018–23), where, suspended from the ceiling, they form fleshy, synthetic panels resembling walls, portals or scrolls. They index light from multiple locations and change in appearance depending on the site’s conditions. Look closely and they appear like slivers of sunrise, folds of skin or dark gums over teeth. Now, Kang’s attention is turning deeper into this process for her new work.
‘It was always a kind of private performance,’ Kang tells me when I visit her studio in DUMBO, Brooklyn, where a greenhouse sits in the middle of the room as a mock-up for her current show at 52 Walker. ‘And it made sense that the process would become a part of the work.’ Greenhouses are neither entirely outdoors nor indoors. Their steel armatures and polycarbonate walls make them artificial, yet their contents are organic. The plants within them are alive, but likely not in their natural habitat. For Kang, this makes them ‘architectures of becoming’ – spaces that facilitate transformation and process.
I’m doing diaspora rather than showing it. I’m inhabiting a state of being in-between.
The greenhouses cannot be entered, placing the viewer in a limbo between inside and outside, like her own version of a Dan Graham pavilion. I walk around the one in her studio. The gestalt of Kang’s large installations is often punctuated by many smaller, detailed moments. Cut fragments of mesh produce bags sitting atop the greenhouse appear as red splotches that have bled through the translucent polycarbonate roof, creating splashes of colour on the mirrored floor. Yellow foam pear holders, looking like petrified jellyfish, sit in small groupings alongside ceramic casts of baby birds. Elsewhere, objects are frozen in states of transformation: dried anchovies, napa leaves and lotus tubers cast in aluminium and bronze hang from the ceiling, rest on the floor or languish in metal bowls.
Kang wonders whether greenhouses could also be ‘diasporic vessels’. Placeless and liminal, they share qualities she associates with diasporic experience. Born in Toronto to Korean parents and now based in New York, Kang’s practice often draws from her family history, as well as from the histories of colonization and imperialism in Asia. Yet, rather than work autobiographically or with recognizable cultural symbols, she prefers to denature identity into the material processes and physical choreography of her installations.
For her first greenhouse as artwork, titled Receiver Transmitter (Butterfly) (2023–24) – shown at Greater Toronto Art 2024 – Kang lined the four-metre hot house with gum rubber and arranged an unfolded tatami mat holding various objects in the centre. Used historically in Japan as sites for sleeping, eating and living, tatami mats are so personal, so synonymous with a person’s being, that they are occasionally burned along with an individual at their funeral. Kang uses them as stand-ins for a body carrying layered histories and geographies, but also as a plinth for an aluminium cast of an enlarged knot of kelp – a plant whose rootlessness inspired Kang to use it as a substitute for a body. The tatami mats in Receiver Transmitter (Perilla Frutescens) (2023), featured in her 2023 exhibition ‘In Cascades’ at Chisenhale Gallery in London, nodded to a historical detail about Kang’s grandmother, a grain and seed shopkeeper who would sometimes sleep at her shop to work extra hours to make enough to provide for her family. This work presented a stack of tatamis covered in a silicone sheath, with aluminium perilla leaves tucked between each mat, like joists between vertebrae. A gathering of aluminium sculptures of cabbage leaves, lotus roots, shiitakes and torn mesh bags was tucked between the tatamis and the wall, like an accumulation of dust or a hidden loot, titled Leak (2023). Each plant holds cultural significance to her upbringing, operating as coded signifiers that some will recognize and some will not. Even when her references are personal or historical, they are often so abstracted that they are alienated or torqued from their roots. ‘I’m doing diaspora rather than showing it’, Kang tells me. ‘I’m inhabiting a state of being in-between.’
When we first met, back in 2018, I had just seen her installation Channeler (2018) at Brooklyn’s Interstate Projects: a set of snaking metallic walls hung with fleshy photographic skins. I moved in and out of the porous partitions of Channeler, looking through their openings, and I could not discern a clear distinction between inside and outside. I peered down into a black plastic bag filled with pink silicone and read the press release, which described how Kang considered the spindly walls as ‘mutated gardens’ and ‘frayed double-helixes’. Citing Trinh T. Minh-ha and Donna Haraway, Kang referred to her process as an inheritance ‘from her familial matriarchs’ – a kind of diasporic, body-centric feminist theory. Then, like now, Kang can distil tomes of theory into eloquent sound bites, while the work itself often remains open-ended, even oblique in its references.
If materials are ‘words’, then installation is the syntax – the body moves through them like a poem.
That same year, I invited Kang to install Channeler as part of ‘Formula 1’, a group exhibition at CUE Art Foundation in New York that I co-organized with writer and artist Mira Dayal. Kang, who had relocated to Toronto after graduating with an MFA from Bard College in 2015, returned to New York for the show, arriving with her partner and installing the work in the gallery herself. What drew us to her practice – along with that of the other two featured artists, Nikita Gale and Amanda Turner Pohan – was a shared interest in developing a material vocabulary that could approximate a new wave of body-based art. It was the germ of an idea that would be explored more fully by curators Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli in the 2024 Whitney Biennial.
During the pandemic, Kang stayed in Toronto. She began to study acupuncture and Chinese medicine, logging two years towards a degree before she dropped out to move back to New York. Now, she studies acupuncture mostly informally, through her interest in Daoist texts, performing it only on friends and loved ones. But the benefits of her healing practice clarified her artistic ambitions. ‘It helped me understand what art can do and what applied medicine can do,’ she tells me. ‘Art is less direct – which is its strength – and learning acupuncture alleviated some of the demands that I had placed on my art.’
Standing inside Kang’s installation, the body itself becomes a sieve, filtering history, memory and light.
Over the past two years, Kang’s sculptural grammar has expanded across major installations. At the 2021 New Museum Triennial, she presented Great Shuttle (2020–21), a flexible track of steel studs and aircraft cable dressed with film, photograms, spherical magnets and various cast-aluminium objects – a noticeable continuation of themes explored in Channeler. At the 2024 Whitney Biennial, she showed the third iteration of ‘In Cascades’, in which sheets of tanned skins hung in modular labyrinths through which viewers could move – the most visible presentation to date of her best-known body of work. She also received a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as a shout-out in The New York Times in December as one of their ten ‘breakout stars’ of the year. With her latest solo presentation having opened at 52 Walker in April, she has had a big three years.
At 52 Walker, Kang responded to the symmetry of the gallery by leaving the space mostly open and raw, with no walls built or major architectural interventions. In addition to two greenhouses, there are some lushly hued luminograms, which transform plastic bags to look like muscle or tendons, a selection of tanned skins and both floor-based and suspended sculptures. Downstairs, however, Kang has transformed an entire room into a version of an installation drawn from her 2024 exhibition ‘Azaleas’ at Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles. A rotary dryer – another ‘architecture of becoming’ used to stretch and dry freshly processed, still-wet 35mm film – is synchronized to the metre of several texts, including works by two Korean poets: ‘Azaleas’ (1925) by Kim So-wol and ‘Already’ (2018) by Kim Hyesoon. In the version at 52 Walker, a light shines through a film of orchids stretched around the dryer. Standing inside this work, the viewer is subsumed entirely by the projection of the film, as if the walls of Channeler or the panels of In Cascades have become immaterial.
‘Lately, I’ve been thinking about my sculptural language as akin to making a poem,’ Kang tells me. ‘If the materials and the objects I work with are “words” that have social and personal associations and meaning, they create syntaxes when put into relation via installation, collage, assemblage, etc. These syntaxes then shift shape and order as the body moves around them in space.’ The studio, then, is filled with poems, translated into material vignettes. We discuss the title of the 52 Walker show, ‘Already’, taken from Hyesoon’s eponymous poem and meant to refer to a cyclical, non-linear time. ‘Can you define the word “already” without using the word already?’ Kang asks. The short poem, from Hyesoon’s 2018 collection The Autobiography of Death, reads: You are already born inside death (echoes 49 times).
In some forms of Buddhism, 49 days represents the length of time a soul spends in an intermediate space between death and rebirth. ‘Already’ appears as day 28 of Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death, where each chapter is structured around one of the 49 days. Both of Kang’s greenhouses at 52 Walker translate this poem: one through 49 objects, a physical manifestation of this liminality; the other through an installation containing the traces of a ritual-performance Kang enacted. In the studio, Kang asks me to stand outside of the greenhouse as she rotates a bare lightbulb slowly around a roll of film. The light undulates across the polycarbonate walls, making the entire structure pulsate like a jellyfish or an otherworldly egg. The film comes from 49 Echoes (2025), a ritual-performance Kang enacted at Fort Tilden Beach in New York, where she walked in a large circle 49 times, holding the camera at gut-level, lens pointing out to film the environment as she moved, rather than depict her body.
Even when her references are personal, they are often abstracted – alienated or torqued from their roots.
Kang tells me that Kim Hyesoon wrote Autobiography of Death in response to the 304 deaths that occurred in the Sewol ferry incident in 2014, where the boat capsized while travelling from Incheon to Jeju Island in South Korea. The government initially reported that everyone had been rescued and then downplayed the severity of the disaster to save face. For Kang, Hyesoon’s book speaks not only to the South Korean situation and the history of American military involvement in the region, but also to the global rise of authoritarianism. Suddenly, the cast-aluminium anchovies, fermented cabbage and ceramic birds take on a different pallor, while the mirrored floor of the greenhouse looks almost spiritual. If her earliest explorations investigated the liminality of the body in space, that interest has only naturally expanded into the historical and the cosmic. The greenhouses feel like futuristic shrines, as if each object were an offering to try to understand this purgatory. Kang has even placed bottles of ‘spirits’, both beneath and in each greenhouse – specifically, bottles of ‘American Soju’, whose logo, incredibly, features the American flag transposed on top of part of the Korean flag.
For all of her recent reflections on death, Kang is equally interested in rebirth. ‘Orchids are epiphytes,’ she tells me in reference to the film in her ‘Azaleas’ installation, ‘which means their roots grow in the air.’ I looked it up. Orchids often grow on the stems of other plants but, surprisingly, not in a parasitic way. They exist in a system of mutuality where they derive their moisture and nutrients from the air, rain and water accumulating around them. As we stand amidst the waves of light from the film, I am struck by how corporal the process of translation seems in Kang’s practice. I imagine her holding the Hyesoon poem in her mind, selecting materials and arranging them around the greenhouse, her body a sieve through which experience is filtered and processed, as sensitive as photographic film or as obdurate as the steel beams on the wall.
This article first appeared in frieze issue 251 with the headline ‘Lotus L. Kang’
Lotus L. Kang’s ‘Already’ is on view at 52 Walker, New York, until 7 June
Main image: Lotus L. Kang, Molt (Toronto-Chicago-Woodridge-New York-) (detail), 2022–25, installation view. Courtesy: © Lotus L. Kang and 52 Walker, New York
