Leaky Fractals

Lotus L. Kang’s work unfurls like a poem. The forms that crop up in her practice initially conjure a language of minimalism, be they greenhouses or colossal sheets of unfixed, light-sensitive film. However, like reading a poem in which discrete words and stanzas are eventually displaced by the force of an elusive whole, Kang’s work pulls away as soon as it begins to come into focus.

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In New York, the Canadian artist explains how poetry wields language in a way that squares well with her commitment to states of liminality. “You have to grasp at what you're sensing, and there’s a lot of onus on the viewer or the reader. It's a very contingent medium in that way,” Kang says. “Poetry metabolizes slowly, but you can often read a poem in five seconds.” For her, this effect is not merely experienced on a semantic level. Its metamorphosis is also felt in the reader’s body over time. 

In “Already,” the artist's solo show at 52 Walker, which runs through June 7, one poem in particular forms the kernel from which the artist’s conceptual inquiries emanate. Across installations, sculptures, luminograms, and photograms, Kang attempts to “translate” the Korean poet Kim Hyesoon’s “Already” from Autobiography of Death, 2018, a book in which each of the 49 poems corresponds to one of the days between death and rebirth in Buddhist rituals and tradition. At times, she translates with mathematical exactness, as with her two greenhouses, Receiver Transmitter (49 Echoes I), 2022-2025, and Receiver Transmitter (49 Echoes II), 2025, that symmetrically divide the gallery space. As viewers walk between or around the structures, the impermeable walls facing toward the gallery entry give way to openings on the side. The plexiglass floors mirror up toward the opening, which extends up to the viewers’ knees, impeding movement as soon as it invites it. 

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Forty-nine objects are placed within, throughout, and on top of the first of the two steel and polycarbonate frames. Inside is a mirror-covered tatami mat topped by a large, aluminum-kelp knot and surrounded by bottles of American Soju, dried lotus tubers, aluminum lotus tubers, and aluminum and plaster birds. Within the fogged polycarbonate walls, Kang embeds the exhibition’s hero image, a photograph of the beach she captured with her phone following her recent 40th birthday performance, where she walked 49 times in a circle on the beach while directing a camera outward. The distinctly more minimal second structure, Receiver Transmitter (49 Echoes II), contains six colorful bottles of spirits arranged in a rectangle around a partially unspooled roll of 35mm film—the result of Kang’s birthday ritual.

Even though Kang’s hand is never overt, its trace is always there. While she routinely strews objects representing animals, plants, or natural phenomena throughout her installations, she very rarely, if ever, affords humans such direct visibility. Her oblique approach to human representation is best epitomized by her use of film as skin. “I'm interested in seeing the body as reflected as or through, or represented by what it's not—meaning what’s outside of it, beyond the limit of the physical body or the containment of our skin—because that is the reality of who we are as material existences and beings in the world,” she says. 

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Across the artist’s body of work, though, the element of chance produces not only difference, but repetition. She describes her greenhouses as leaky portals into one another. “There’s continuity there,” she says, “but also all sorts of debris picked up along the way.” Fittingly, many forms and materials from Kang’s past exhibitions reappear in different configurations throughout 52 Walker. With the greenhouses, there is an echo of the structure that she uses to “tan” her film sheets, one she first explored while working with the gallery’s director Ebony L. Haynes for the 2024 MOCA Toronto Triennial. And the same holey steel joists from which the artist suspended her “In Cascades” film sheets at last year’s Whitney Biennial are repurposed as the foundation. She presents these familiar architectures only to defamiliarize them.

Kang partially explains the deconstructive nature of “Already” with a quote from Trinh T. Minh-ha’s “Grandma’s Story,” where the Vietnamese filmmaker and writer claims, “To listen carefully is to preserve. But to preserve is to burn, for understanding means creating.” For Kang, the tension between preservation and destruction is essential. At times, this logic takes on a material quality, as in the bruises of purple, rust, and orange that mark both the chemical transformation of the film skins and that evoke, on an affective level, a “trauma as well as a healing.” At other times, it is rendered much more abstractly in that zone between representation and non-representation. 

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Built atop these conceptual undercurrents, Kang’s structures remain alluring yet anti-monumental. This is especially the case with Azaleas II, 2024, an installation housed in the basement of the gallery. First shown in her exhibition “Azaleas” at Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles last year, Azaleas II loosely centers around a large rotary film-dryer wrapped with 35mm strips that repeat images of purple orchids. Placed atop a tatami mat scattered with bottles, sculptural readymades, and other objects familiar to the artist’s syntax, the film-dryer rotates to a score derived from Hyesoon’s “Already” and Kim Sowol’s 1925 poem “Azaleas.” Three lights shine on the rotating structure, casting sacred geometries of light, shadow, and color throughout the space and the bodies that mill about. The work routinely calls attention to a center (and periphery) of perception, understanding, and meaning that it just as routinely displaces. “I point to the boundary constantly, and then I disappear it at the same time,” Kang says.

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"Already" is on view through June 7, 2025 at 52 Walker, New York at 52 Walker Street, New York NY 10013.