The Brooklyn Rail

Canadian-born, New York-based artist Lotus L. Kang’s solo exhibition at 52 Walker takes its title, Already, from Korean poet Kim Hyesoon’s collection Autobiography of Death (2018). Written following the poet’s sudden collapse and the subsequent confrontation with pain and loss, the forty-nine poems in the collection reflect on death at both individual and collective levels. In the gallery, two greenhouses mirror one another across the industrial beams that bisect the space. Tucked beneath one of the greenhouses is the poetry collection, resting under a blanket of dried ginkgo leaves. The book is open to a page with translated lines from Kim’s poem that read, “You are already born inside death (echoes 49 times).”¹

In Buddhist traditions, a mourning ritual is held for forty-nine days after death as the spirit makes its passage through the bardo, a liminal state where seven deities determine the soul’s karmic rebirth across seven weeks. The number seven, resonant across many Asian cosmologies, signifies cosmic completeness, as it recurs in the Big Dipper, days of the week, and the number of chakras. Seven multiplied by itself, forty-nine, thus becomes a symbol of transition, the duration required for the soul’s transformation from one life to the next.

At 52 Walker, this idea of transitory existence is echoed in the two large architectural forms facing one another. To the left, Receiver Transmitter (49 Echoes I) (2022–25) contains forty-nine objects culled from the artist’s practice: a tatami mat, a metal-cast kelp knot and cabbage leaf, tanned film, mesh bags, styrofoam fruit holders, and fragments of earlier works. The sprawled-out artifacts from the artist’s oeuvre elicit a sense of play, as if they await enactment.

Mirroring it, Receiver Transmitter (49 Echoes II) (2025) features a revolving light bulb set within a strip of film anchored by bottles of “spirits.” On her birthday, Kang performed 49 Echoes (2025), walking around in circles forty-nine times wearing a camera. Rather than centering the artist’s body, the documentation alludes to the body through its traces. A photograph of a circular footprint on a beach and a film strip composed of stills from the recorded video preserve the act. In the center, the rotating light recalls a projector, the circling performer, and the spirit passing through the bardo.

This act of mirroring extends throughout the exhibition, particularly in the abundance of photosensitive materials surrounding the greenhouses. The wall collages reference the objects found throughout the gallery, disrupting any illusion of temporal and ontological fixity. Despite the abundance of reverberations in the form of light tracings, none stand in for another. In Kang’s work, photosensitive surfaces act less as captures and more as sites of becoming, an ongoing remembrance. As I walked around the tanned and unfixed films of “Molt”, I recognized the tracings of various temporalities, objects, and myself interweaving on the surfaces of the filmic skin. It witnesses as much as it is being witnessed. As art historian Kaja Silverman argues in The Miracle of Analogy or The History of Photography, Part 1 (2015), photography becomes “the world’s primary way of revealing itself to us—of demonstrating that it exists, and that it will forever exceed us,” and I, “a node in a vast constellation of analogies.”

The loosening of photographic relationality—between the image and the referent—mirrors Kang’s approach to storytelling, particularly that of diaspora, by storing, translating, and transmitting stories through bodies. Many recurring motifs in her practice—beans and seeds, produce wrappers, and cast aluminum anchovies—are drawn from her grandmother’s life. Fleeing North Korea, Kang’s paternal grandmother sold grains and seeds to provide for her seven children. As filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha writes in an essay in Woman, Native, Other (1989), “to listen carefully is to preserve. But to preserve is to burn, for understanding means creating.” The sprawling objects and porous boundaries found in the works speak to this aspect of loss that coexists with the possibility of reiteration in this form of transmission.

In 2020, Kang formally began studying acupuncture, a practice that views the body as a network of interconnected systems, where even the smallest feature—a palm, a foot, or a pulse—can reflect the whole. Similarly, the collective presentation of Kang’s work at 52 Walker, including the two formative pieces inhabiting the space downstairs, presents a body of work where individual elements resonate in poetic reciprocity. These reverberations—rather than fixating on similarities or differences—correspond with one another, prying open the space of the in-between.

In Tract XIX (You are already) and Tract XX (You are already II) (both 2025), strings of cast aluminum and bronze anchovies, lotus root slices, and kelp knots hang from large steamers that recall gongs. Placed outside, the strings of anchovies would chime with a blow of gentle breeze, their bodies striking one another in rippling percussion. Perhaps this is how stories persist: as vibrations resonating from one body to another. These echoes, then, must transfer through each of our bodies in the same manner that they reached us.