Lotus L. Kang: Already

Press Release

52 Walker is pleased to announce its fifteenth exhibition, Already, featuring work by Canadian-born, New York–based artist Lotus L. Kang. Kang’s multidisciplinary practice includes sculpture, photography, and installation, often reflecting on ideas of impermanence, inheritance, memory, and time. In her iterative presentations, Kang realizes these thematic concerns by transforming materials like photographic paper and film whose light-sensitive surfaces implicate traces of surrounding architecture and bodies. At 52 Walker, the artist brings together a selection of discrete objects, wall works, and an installation staged within and around two greenhouses.

The exhibition title Already draws from an eponymous poem by Kim Hyesoon—one of forty-nine from her book Autobiography of Death (2019), which considers the Buddhist tradition of after-death rituals performed for forty-nine days during the intermediate period spanning death and rebirth.

Lotus L. Kang: Already is curated by Ebony L. Haynes and presented by 52 Walker. Special thanks to Denniston Hill for their ongoing support.

Two modified greenhouses, respectively titled Receiver Transmitter (49 Echoes I and II), prominently mirror each other across the infrastructural pillars bisecting the gallery. Regularly utilized by Kang in outdoor environments as a process tool for exposing photographic film from her series Molt, the greenhouses at 52 Walker have been brought indoors, here envisioned as permeable, metabolic environments. Works titled Mesoderm punctuate the gallery walls, serving as abstracted indexes of Kang’s ongoing research and fixations, culled from her archive of found and taken photographs or from memory. To accompany the exhibition, the gallery is pleased to present a formative work from Kang’s recent Azaleas series that functions like the underbelly to Already. Azaleas II is titled after a 1925 poem by Korean modernist Kim Sowol (1902–1934). This kinetic sculpture comprises an enlarged rotary film dryer and a diaphanous length of 35 mm film depicting purple orchids that tautly wraps around its metal skeleton; the machine is placed atop a low, tatami-like base strewn with objects that reverberate within the artist’s orbit. The sculpture rotates according to a score that combines the syllabic meter of Sowol’s “Azaleas” alongside Kim Hyesoon’s “Already.”

Lotus L. Kang was born in Toronto in 1985. She received a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal, in 2008, and an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College, New York, in 2015. Kang has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. In 2023, she presented In Cascades, a major traveling solo exhibition co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London, and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. Further solo presentations have been held at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2024); Franz Kaka, Toronto (2023, 2020, 2017); Helena Anrather, New York (2021); Oakville Galleries, Ontario (2019); Interstate Projects, New York (2018); and Raster Gallery, Warsaw (2015), among others. Kang has also been included in several significant group exhibitions. Her installation In Cascades (2023) was featured in Even Better Than the Real Thing, the 2024 iteration of the Whitney Biennial.

The artist lives and works in New York. She is represented by Franz Kaka, Toronto, and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.