Combining photography, film and sculpture, this immersive installation looks at how bodies change over time, what we remember and what gets lost along the way. The exhibition’s title is drawn from Thresholes (2020), a poetry collection by American writer Lara Mimosa Montes. Echoing Montes’ writing, Kang’s installation lives in the space in between, where time and the body are fluid and constantly changing.
Lotus L. Kang, The face of desire is loss, Bvlgari Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale, Venice, 2026
Lengths of unfixed photographic film, which Kang calls 'skins', are suspended from steel joists. They respond to light and humidity, developing bruises, blood and bile-like hues over time. Sculptures of tatami mats and cast objects in plaster, bronze and fibreglass of crying birds and kelp knots evoke the body in states of rest, dream, recovery and death. 49 bottles of spirits reflect the days a soul spends between death and rebirth, in Buddhist belief, alongside a film of tidal mudflats and visualisations of birdsong. Together they symbolise the constant flux of life and death.
Get to know Lotus L. Kang
Lotus L. Kang’s works across sculpture, photography and site-responsive installation. Using an acute sensitivity towards process and space, her work reflects on impermanence, inheritance, memory and time. Taking up questions of 'becoming' on expansive terms, she often uses unstable and unfixed materials that meld structural, organic and entropic forms to explore self and environment as contingent, continuous and inseparable.
Recent solo exhibitions include The face of desire is loss, Bvlgari Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale (2026); I hear the hollow boom of time, Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2026); Casket, Mendes Wood, Germantown (2026); Chora, Kukje Gallery, Seoul (2026); Borne, Esther Schipper, Berlin (2026); Already, 52 Walker, New York (2025); In Cascades, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2023) and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2023).
Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, among others.
