We’re greeted by what seems to be a pair of metallic drums suspended from the ceiling upon getting into Lotus L. Kang’s exhibition Already at 52 Walker, curated by Ebony L. Haynes. Their musical potential, quieted for now, is as a substitute visualized by means of sharp metallic kinds tumbling vertically downward. A better look reveals that these quasi-chimes — they’ve functioned as such in earlier iterations — are solid into the form of anchovies, their slender our bodies riddled with holes earlier than being strung collectively as casually as flower chains. And the metal drum will not be a drum in any respect, however a kitchen steamer. Is that this a scene of ceremonial demise, of objects methodically leeched of their perform? Or a firmament of collective chance — the music to be made, the dish to be shared?
Kang’s work is characterised by poetic abstractions that make clear into discernible on a regular basis objects. Their magic is drawn out by the artist’s meticulous rearrangements, rewarding solely the affected person observer. Collectively the sculptures, entitled “Tract XX (You are already II)” and “Tract XIX (You are already)” (each 2025), are in some methods a portrait of the Canadian-born artist’s diasporic life as a “fish out of water,” and gives a useful framework to attach with the rest of the works within the exhibition.
Set up view of Lotus L. Kang, “Tract XX (You are already II)” (2025) and Lotus L. Kang, “Tract XIX (You are already)” (2025)
Anchoring opposing sides of the gallery are two equivalent metal greenhouse constructions titled “Receiver Transmitter” (2025), which kind the form of a bisected tunnel. They supply a glimpse into Kang’s technique of tanning massive lengths of movie for different close by works, comparable to these within the Molt collection (2024–25), whose patterns are formed by the brilliant mild inside the greenhouse. Within the gallery, they’ve been drained of heat and daylight; nothing grows inside. In actual fact, they maintain the inverse of abundance: Styrofoam fruit nets nonetheless pregnant with the void of what they as soon as held, dried lotus tubers, lonely liquor bottles, and porcelain chook collectible figurines with mouths agape. Defying expectations, the arched structure as a substitute seems like a mechanical throat, as prompt by the work’s title, upsetting a shudder once we are inside its chilly and silent vice.
Draped on industrial cables behind this set up are dramatic scrolls of movie that proceed to vary slowly as they’re uncovered to mild. In “Molt,” Kang relinquishes management to the weather whereas sustaining immaculate precision in composition. The movie’s gradients, starting from a sooty brown to luminous peach, evoke a metropolitan skyline at sunset or a skeletal X-ray scan. Just like the spotless mirrors that cowl the surfaces of neighboring sculptures, Kang’s mercurial picture negatives invite viewers’ projections to finish the work.
Lotus L. Kang, “Azaleas II” (2025)
Thinker Byung-Chul Han identifies this “molting” sensibility in his observations concerning the Chinese language idea of shanzhai, wherein a chunk of artwork is fluid and ever-changing, “like a living creature that grows, sheds its skin, and transforms himself.” It’s a philosophy without delay at odds with Western artwork historic traditions of static and discrete objects, in addition to the industrial pursuits of coveting or gathering. On this approach, Kang matches neatly into Haynes’s ongoing program, which was established as a undertaking by and for individuals of shade, however most significantly, embraces opacity as refuge for the wounded. This angle feels particularly vital when figuration by oppressed minorities as a type of symbolic restore has develop into each state-sanctioned and subsumed by the market — a mix that’s politically anesthetized, “noxious to no one,” as Jodi Melamet excellently places it. At a time when a militarized state is actively paralyzing liberation actions with violence and effectivity, Already provokes the query: How may we survive by means of these brutal constraints, this enforced stasis that known as being alive?
Kang challenges the expectation that continuous creation and a predetermined morbid destiny are contradictory. Songless birds, deodorized fish, under- or over-developed movie — these subjectless voids every dramatize the tragedy of what defeat may appear to be. And but, even in extinguished life, there’s life. Kang evaluates what new prospects and temporalities can emerge from participating in processes alien or forbidden, comparable to exposing movie to daylight. Even objects fossilized into stillness are plotting their subsequent movement — contained “spirits” and animals threatening personhood — defying their categorization.
Element view of Lotus L. Kang, “Azaleas II” (2025)
Descending the gallery stairs, one passes by means of a dense forest of commercial bookshelves — the gallery’s library assortment — with the intention to view Kang’s magnum opus, “Azaleas II” (2025). The work spins clear movie round a metallic body, projecting ribbons of subdued shade across the room’s perimeter. Echoing the dipoles of earlier work (skeletal and architectural, illuminated however darkish, punctured however womb-like), it additionally accommodates a web page from Autobiography of Dying (2018) by Kim Hyesoon, which provides the present’s title, in response to the press launch. The poem has not but been translated from Korean, defying straightforward interpretive which means on this context for these unfamiliar with the language, simply because the 35mm movie that rotates across the dryer’s axis divulges no legible which means, revealing upon shut inspection solely the blossoms of purple orchids. To want understanding, to ask what all of it means, is to be invited to dive into the archives, as Kang clearly has accomplished by means of rigorous historic and materials analysis.
Kang joins these voices from the previous in forming a bulwark towards the rising tides of political pessimism by transferring the objective submit from an agreeable ending to the need of course of, wherein we cling collectively even when collectively spiraling across the identical axis in perpetuity. If the pursuit of freedom is a doom scroll, a spiral that loops again into itself, what occurs if we realized we’ve already arrived? That a part of feeling free is braving the desire to wrestle for it, even realizing that looping again round to the start is inevitable? That is what retains me returning, many times, to expertise Kang’s work as if it have been the primary time.
Set up view of works from Lotus L. Kang’s Molt (2024–25) collection
Element views of Element view of Lotus L. Kang, “Receiver Transmitter (49 Echoes I)” (2022–25)
Set up view of Lotus L. Kang, “Synapse, 15:50” (2025, again) and “Receiver Transmitter (Born inside death)” (2025, entrance)
Lotus L. Kang: Already continues at 52 Walker (52 Walker Road, Tribeca, Manhattan) by means of June 7. The exhibition was curated by Ebony L. Haynes.
