Lotus L. Kang on Mirroring, Roots, and In-Betweenness

Lotus L. Kang: When I think about previous solo shows, you are usually walking into a world, but here, there are multiple worlds within worlds, spaces within spaces. When you walk into the gallery, you see the two greenhouses, but you can’t quite see what’s inside them. At first glance, it is quite minimal and stark, then you walk beyond them and there’s more. The space is dimly lit because I wanted it to feel moody and somber, like a foggy, gray day where you can’t quite tell what time it is. I like to juxtapose what we see versus what we cannot see, what is hidden within the shadows.

LLK: As far as the show at 52 Walker went, I felt the most site-responsive thing to do was to not build any walls and to leave the space raw. The long rectangular shape of the gallery is divided by infrastructural pillars. That split of the space, almost like a mirroring of the space itself, became what I started responding to. I have been thinking about mirrors, reflection and refractions in my work for years.

LLK: I thought about mirrors because they are a translation of reality. Mirrors speak to notions of photography, but also self-identification and seeing of the self. In a horizontal state, the mirrors reflect the environment first, inherently positioning the self as the environment. In the greenhouse, it doubles the architecture by turning the semicircular dome into a full circle.

LLK: Also, if another person is on the other side, you see them pulled inside through the reflection. Greenhouses are not fully inside or outside spaces in a strictly conventional sense. They embody this kind of in-between state, which refuses a clear or fixed reading, and in-betweenness is also a very diasporic condition. Initially, when you walk into the gallery, you don’t see inside the greenhouses. You see through this translucent polycarbonate that creates a foggy, unformed view of their interiors. I intentionally wanted them to face each other across the pillars, as if they were mirrored and split. On a somatic level, you as the viewer are both inside and outside at the same time because of your bodily relation to them as you enter the gallery. You are outside of this inside, and yet you’re inside the gallery. And the space between the two greenhouses becomes this extra-charged zone where you’re in between these in-betweens.

LLK: Yes, it splits open, confuses, and flattens that binary. I actually haven’t figured out: are you inside or outside when you’re gazing through all those thresholds? My work at large is thinking through ideas of translation, which I also see as a regurgitation—this idea that we echo back or translate the world we are in, but this mirroring back is never the same as what came into us.

LLK: In one of the greenhouses, there is an enlarged kelp knot, which I often use in lieu of a body. A kelp has no root. In my mind, it’s this rootless entangled body. The light bulb is also a kind of body I see circling in repetition, echoing my own body that performed a ritual of circling, which is depicted on the film that the bulb is circling within. A body doesn’t always have to congeal around figuration. Here, the body presents itself as movement and illumination.

LLK: Yes, it’s the inside outside concept again. It’s rooted and unrooted, and these oppositions come into an entanglement. What is unrooted is only defined in relation to rooted, and who defines what’s rooted? They are very like slippery terms, and I constantly try to point out, undo, and complicate them at the same time.

LLK: Baby rats have this capacity to provoke very dualistic emotions, particularly one of care and tenderness and one of total repulsion and destruction. The baby birds came through reading a lot of poetry with bird imagery.. I had also been thinking about mother bodies for a long time, whether it be a biological gendered mother, or other kinds of mother figures that constitute a body in terms of time, inheritance, histories, and cultural entanglements.

I don’t fully recall but I might have initially come across an image of a baby bird, and I was struck by its open mouth and deep desperation. It looks up and out at the world from a horizontal nest. I was interested in the baby bird as a kind of new life that is extremely vulnerable, unable to fend for itself; in that sense to me, it is almost alive and dead at the same time. Of course, they also speak to ideas of care, inheritance, and passing along. Baby birds ingest regurgitated food from their parents and metabolize it again, so it is going back to this idea of my work as a regurgitation. It is a translation that becomes another translation.

LLK: Yes, it changes speed. This work was catalyzed when I enrolled in experimental filmmaking classes and came across this tool called a rotary film dryer. It’s a way to dry film, but it is also a very process-oriented form and I became obsessed with it and wanted to enlarge it and turn it into a site of projection. I was reading translations of modernist Korean poetry, and I came across multiple interpretations of the famous poem Azaleas by Kim Sowol, which was written in 1925, at the time of Japan’s colonization of Korea. It’s an almost saccharine poem that describes a woman losing her lover. She spreads azalea flowers in her lover’s path and resolutely says, “I won’t shed a tear as you turn around and leave me.” It’s full of loss, longing, and sorrow, but it has also been interpreted as a metaphor for the loss of a nation. A poem inherently resists a singular meaning, and it changes over time and in relation to the body reading it; Azaleas was the first time I explicitly thought about undoing or translating this poem.

I filmed flowers. There are roses in the first iteration and now purple orchids with Azaleas II. They are never azaleas captured. There is always this gap or loss, a kind of break from the origin, which also describes this diasporic gap: you can never touch the origin, even though it’s of you.

The rotation pattern follows a score I wrote that combines one stanza of the poem Azaleas with one line of Kim Hyesoon’s poem, Already. The rotations follow the syllabic meter. Between series of rotations there are gaps of 49 seconds wherein the sculpture is moving very very slowly, and then there is also a 49 second period of stillness, then the whole score mirrors and repeats from there.

Then there’s the base that the sculpture rests on, holding a constellation of objects. One of them is Kim’s book Autobiography of Death, in Korean, opened to the poem Already, and then underneath it is a photograph I took of a mudflat I visited in South Korea. I’m doing research on mud and tidal flats, which are ecosystems which have a very in-between quality as well. And underneath it is a cast aluminum copy of the book In Praise of Shadows by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki.

LLK: I always call them spirits because it’s a way to point to alcohol as a form that metabolizes in the body and alters states, but they also signify predecessors or beings that haunt and inhabit us. Spirits are a conduit. I don’t subscribe to any specific religion, but I’m drawn to many Buddhist concepts and beliefs, and I have a growing knowledge of Korean shamanism. Many spirits are used in rituals as offerings to transcend the notion of self-bounded bodies.

LLK: Yes, and yet they are still very of-the-world in a social sense. That’s what I love about them. I know my work provokes this ethereal feeling, but when you look at it and break down what it is: that is steel, that is aluminum, that’s alcohol. Those are very worldly things.

LLK: I’m enjoying 35mm film and will probably keep working with that. I am thinking a lot about mud. Mud is this multiplicity that moves between form and formlessness, high and low tide. Especially with these tidal flats that I have been researching, they are in between ecosystems called ecotones which is where two distinct biological systems meet and integrate.I am also interested in what mud holds in terms of history and memory.

LLK: I think plants are emblematic of cycles of time, life, and death. They are both visible (above ground) and invisible (underground). They are intelligent, interconnected systems. For Azaleas II, it felt important to have this work downstairs in the dark as a kind of churning motor that is there, even though you can’t see it. I wanted to create this element of surprise: a viewer goes and sees the work upstairs, and then you come down and find out this has been happening the whole time. So maybe Azaleas II is like the root of the work, and the works above are the sprouts.

LLK: But the work is also a machine. As soon as something feels tender, I want to contrast it with a kind of severity.

LLK: I hope my work creates intimacy by encouraging people to look closely. You can’t go into the greenhouses, but they’re very intimate spaces, and I’m interested in producing that kind of tension, an intimacy via distance. There are very specific reasons why all those materials exist in the greenhouse with the 49 objects, but I don’t need everyone to know what they are. If it catalyzes another translation or regurgitation, then I’ve done my job.