LOTUS L.KANG

Profile: At 52 Walker, the artist expands her sculptural grammar, exploring diasporic time, material transformation and the body as a site of flux

- Simon Wu

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 amock-up for her current showat 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.