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 an alternative visualized via 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 dying, of objects methodically leeched of their operate? Or a firmament of collective risk — 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 similar metal greenhouse buildings 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, reminiscent of these within the Molt sequence (2024–25), whose patterns are formed by the brilliant gentle throughout the greenhouse. Within the gallery, they’ve been drained of heat and daylight; nothing grows inside. In reality, 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 chicken collectible figurines with mouths agape. Defying expectations, the arched structure as an alternative appears like a mechanical throat, as recommended by the work’s title, scary 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 gentle. 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 in regards to 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 directly at odds with Western artwork historic traditions of static and discrete objects, in addition to the industrial pursuits of coveting or gathering. On this method, Kang suits neatly into Haynes’s ongoing program, which was established as a challenge by and for folks of shade, however most significantly, embraces opacity as refuge for the wounded. This attitude feels particularly necessary when figuration by oppressed minorities as a type of symbolic restore has turn out to be 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 would possibly we survive via these brutal constraints, this enforced stasis that is named 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 would possibly appear like. And but, even in extinguished life, there’s life. Kang evaluates what new potentialities and temporalities can emerge from participating in processes alien or forbidden, reminiscent of 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 via a dense forest of commercial bookshelves — the gallery’s library assortment — with a purpose 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 incorporates 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 need understanding, to ask what all of it means, is to be invited to dive into the archives, as Kang clearly has carried out via rigorous historic and materials analysis.
Kang joins these voices from the previous in forming a bulwark towards the rising tides of political pessimism by shifting the aim put up 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 need to wrestle for it, even understanding that looping again round to the start is inevitable? That is what retains me returning, repeatedly, to expertise Kang’s work as if it had been the primary time.
Set up view of works from Lotus L. Kang’s Molt (2024–25) sequence
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) via June 7. The exhibition was curated by Ebony L. Haynes.
