Lotus L. Kang
Azaleas
Commonwealth and Council
Los Angeles
Sep 21–Oct 26, 2024 

The Korean cultural sentiment of han describes an emotional state between sadness and hope, reflecting the nation’s long history of meeting hardship with resilience. The concept permeated Lotus L. Kang’s solo exhibition at the Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles, titled “Azaleas” after the flower symbolizing Korean liberation. “Azaleas” also references an eponymous poem by Kim So-wol, written in 1925 during the Japanese occupation of Korea, from the perspective of a grief-stricken woman whose lover has left her. Eliciting these themes, Kang’s striking installations investigated how the body contends with time, memory, and identity through the unconventional transformation of industrial film. 

Kang’s signature “skins” of film cascaded from the gallery’s ceiling in muted tones of turmeric, umber, and violet—colors that the artist associates with bile, blood, and bruises. This was most evident in Molt (Toronto-Chicago-Woodridge-New York-Los Angeles-) (2022–24), a commissioned work made through a process that Kang calls “tanning,” in which the film’s unfixed surface is exposed to light and humidity across various environments, referenced in their titles, over time. Because of this technique, the medium resists its traditional form and use, acting as a sieve to collect and reflect what moves through it.

While Molt basked in the gallery’s sun-drenched main space, Kang’s newest site-specific installation, Azaleas (2024), was concealed behind a curtain in a dark room with blacked-out windows. A bright light illuminated 48 rolls of 35mm celluloid film as they spun on an industrial rotary film dryer synchronized to the rhythm of two poems: Kim’s “Azaleas” in Korean and two lines from Kim Hyesoon’s “Face” (2008) in English. The film strips, which recorded images of rose bushes instead of azaleas due to the artist’s missed opportunity to photograph the latter blooming, cast red and white ribbons of light onto the opposite wall. The absence of the azalea blossoms and Kim’s poem referencing the divided nation created a tension between inherited loss and the unfounded desire to visit a place, person, or memory that no longer exists. In the same room, sculptural artifacts, including cast aluminum anchovies, intervertebral discs, and a lotus root, dotted a Japanese tatami mat covering the floor, creating a ritual-like offering for unseen spiritual protagonists.  

Another work, titled Receiver Transmitter (Inside you there is another you) (2024), located in the main room, featured an enlarged cast aluminum kelp knot, evoking a horizontal, resting body. Kang casts artifacts referencing biological themes, such as the structural optimization of a lotus root, which can withstand external stress through its oval-shaped holes. Much like the “skins” of film, the lotus root’s form is created from the environment it filters and metabolizes. The artist’s process mimics that of a biologist studying the cumulative elements of an ecosystem over time, reinterpreting the knowledge passed down through generations to redraw a new blueprint for being.  

Kang’s installations consider what it means to occupy a body that inherits the memory of han. By imagining the body through alternative ecologies—a lotus root in the mud or a beam of light traveling eight minutes from the sun—Kang created an interconnected world that memorializes the ghosts of our past and the longings of our future, suspended in time for at least a moment.   

Sigourney Schultz is a Los Angeles-based curator, art writer, and editor. 

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