Lotus L. Kang

July 30, 2024

Lotus L. Kang (b. 1985 Toronto, Canada) works with sculpture, photography and site-responsive installation. Select exhibitions include 2024 Whitney Biennial: Even Better Than the Real Thing, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2024), In Cascades, Chisenhale Gallery, London (2023) and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2023); Molt (New York-Lethbridge-Los Angeles-Toronto- Chicago-), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago (2023); Memory Work, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2023); Mother Always Has a Mother, Mercer Union SPACE, Toronto (2023); 2021 Triennial: Soft Water Hard Stone, New Museum, New York (2021); Total Disbelief, SculptureCenter, New York (2019), If I Have A Body, Remai Modern, Saskatoon (2019); Beolle, Oakville Galleries, Oakville (2019) and Formula 1: A Loud, Low Hum, Cue Art Foundation, New York (2019). She holds an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. In 2024 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Can you tell us about your practice?

I work in sculpture, photography, and site-sensitive installation though I identify as a hybrid in terms of medium specificity ie. a sculptor, a photographer, or an installation artist. I feel it’s both and all, and…

I follow materials and ideas that generate curiosity and a sense of unknowing – as they seem to always unveil some kind of connection to things I am reading, looking at, or thinking about but from a different orientation, one that is more sensorially-led rather than cerebrally-led. I call my practice one of regurgitation for this reason, in that it’s never trying to cleanly illustrate but it’s always through a kind of metabolic and regurgitative approach. Some very general themes I seem to keep exploring are around impermanence and the in-between, the non-singularity of the body, and material sensitivity as these relate to identity, time, personal history, cultural knowledge, and memory. I like to make work where you can see how the thing is both put together but also how it might be taken apart.

How is your work “site-sensitive” rather than “site-specific,” and why is that distinction important?

This framing emphasizes relation and becoming-with through ideas of sensitivity — my work is sensitive to the site, but the site is also sensitive to the work. A sensate relation exists between the two. Responsiveness drops the presumption that one thing (site) is a fixed point around which the other (art) orbits; rather, each is changed by the other. Additionally, there is a response, but then also, echoes. It’s a form of practicing non-fixity as a foundational orientation, a positioning that inevitably affects how the work is made.

How does time play a role in your practice, especially with the use of unfixed photographic film that changes noticeably after installation?

The film doesn’t always noticeably change, actually. It depends on the lighting conditions where it is shown, how it is stored, etc. I’m not interested in the point being to see the change as this seems to be very human-centric and limited in terms of thinking of what impermanence, porosity, and sensitivity mean or look like. So sometimes you see the change, and sometimes you don’t. But the point is not to witness its proof of sensitivity or time, but that it simply is in a sensitive state and the change can be very very slow in duration, or very fast (such as in a greenhouse environment, where I do a lot of the tanning of the film-skins). I’m more interested in the awareness of this sensitivity/volatility. and feel this is more reflective of our lived experience where materiality and action are both visible and invisible. Time held in the body is very different than time which measures and structures our movement in the world. Time in the body is already inherited from another(s), and it jumps from pasts and to futures and is sedimented in ways that can’t neatly be measured or calculated.

Can you discuss the cast objects in your installations? What attracts you to cast specific objects and revisit them in multiple works?

I started casting anchovies in aluminum because they were around. This ‘around the body’, or the peripheral to the body as a form of the body itself is what interests me in casting a lot of these objects. So the anchovies were around me – in my childhood and upbringing they were always there in the kitchen as a ubiquitous Korean ingredient. A lot of the food objects I’ve been casting started out this way (such as Asian pears, roots and tubers, and perilla leaves), as a hyper-familiar or multiply ingested/metabolized object that I then had the urge to concretize in some way. Food also implicates metabolic breakdown, and entry and exit through orifices of the body. So casting in metal is a way to monumentalize ideas around metabolization, form becoming formless, transformation, etc. But of course metal itself can be melted down again too which betrays the monumental. The forms too, implicate the viewer; some viewers will see them as very specific, and they will trigger specific cultural memories and sensations in them, while others will recognize them more generally, so they code switch or move between specificity and non-specificity. Lately, I’ve been casting objects like lotus roots and kelp knots and then putting them into relation with each other in installations or sculptures. The tuber is a horizontal, rooted form that lives in the mud, while kelp is an unrooted form (it has something called a holdfast which can migrate from one place to another); I’m working with these figures of the rooted and unrooted and thinking of them in relation rather than in opposition.

For me, repetition or revisitation of these objects is a way to understand what it is I’m doing as an artist as I mostly understand my work in hindsight. But it’s also a way to constantly revise, change, and unfix an object or its meaning from one context to another. I think too, that these objects and materials I return to are not only just emblematic of my own fixation on them, but that they are also fixated on me, as a haunting. It’s not unidirectional.

How does drawing fit into your practice alongside your larger-scale installations? Do you see them as distinct bodies of work or investigation?

Drawing feels like an embryonic part of my practice. In my interest in presenting the process as the work itself, or, enfolding ideas of ‘finished work’ and ‘process’ into each other, the drawings I make also follow this. The act of mark making, drawing, painting, and smudging are all a part of the process of me moving through ideas, or putting the idea on a substrate in a way that is embodied rather than didactic. So for me, they index my process of chewing an idea, word, or image. And they are often quite fast. They feel like the seeds of the larger works as they become a sort of site of germinating ideas.

What has been inspiring you?

Lately, Korean poetry – both historical and contemporary. I’m not fluent in Korean so of course it’s always limited to translations which fascinates me as a residue left in the poems. And mud.

Lotus L. Kang

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