Lotus L. Kang

Lotus L. Kang (born 1985) is a Canadian photographer, sculptor, and installation artist. She is best known for her installation works involving large sheets of unfixed or unprocessed photographic paper or film, often installed along with sculptural objects and greenhouses.

Kang participated in the Whitney Biennial in 2024 and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Early life and education Born in 1985 in Toronto, settling in Seoul before the Korean War. She earned an MFA from Bard College in New York's Hudson Valley in 2015. She moved to Toronto after graduation.

In 2018, in conjunction with Toronto's CONTACT Photography Festival, Kang opened a solo show at Gallery TPW, where she presented a two-room installation titled A Body Knots. The first room featured several metal mixing bowls on the floor filled with colored silicone that contained cast aluminum replicas of food and objects. In the second room, Kang installed new vertical metal armatures from which she suspended lengths of duratrans transparency paper on one side and lengths of unprocessed photo paper on the other. Kang used various photography processing chemicals to create abstract patterns and brush strokes on the unprocessed paper. The same year, she presented the installation work Channeler at the gallery Interstate Projects in Brooklyn. The piece consisted of a curved metal wall hung with skin-like lengths of photo paper alternating along both sides of the piece, along with sculptural objects including a plastic bag full of colored silicone.

2020s In early 2020, Kang participated in an artist residency at the Banff Centre where she created a series of large-format photogram works titled Her Own Devices. The series includes 35 photograms, the age Kang was when creating the works, all of which feature the photographic outlines of woven or netted produce and firewood bags against coral, pink, and red backgrounds. The show featured several large installation works like Mother, made of dozens of metal mixing bowls with small abstract clay, rubber, and stone sculptures scattered in and among the bowls, along with aluminum casts of fruit and anchovies. She also presented Molt, a room filled with lengths of unfixed photographic paper and photographic films laid out like mats over the floor with various small sculptures strewn around, all exposed to light so the sheets changed colors as the exhibition progressed. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kang lived in Toronto and began studying in a program for traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture. The work consisted of a tall metal scaffolding structure that split the gallery in two, paneled with unfixed photo paper that visually changed throughout the exhibition. The same year, she opened Earth Surge, a solo show at Helena Anrather gallery in New York, where she presented another work comprising metal mixing bowls filled with colored silicone and cast metal objects.

After around two years of studying Chinese medicine, Kang left the program and moved to New York full time.

Kang mounted a solo show in March 2023 titled In Cascades at the Chisenhale Gallery in London. In April 2023, Kang was invited to exhibit in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago's atrium gallery. She installed a modified version of her work Molt, with the lengths of photo film hanging from the atrium's tall ceilings. In February 2024, Kang participated in the Los Angeles edition of the Frieze Art Fair with the gallery Commonwealth and Council.

In March 2024, Kang was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Even Better than the Real Thing, curated for the museum by Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli. She showed a third modified version of her unfixed photo film installation In Cascades, Nadja Sayej in the Observer, Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post, and Xenia Benivolski in Texte zur Kunst. Around the same time, Kang began using greenhouses in her installation works, placing various sculptures, "tanned" photographic films, and other objects inside greenhouses installed in a gallery. She showed her first greenhouse work in the Greater Toronto Art triennial exhibition at the city's Museum of Contemporary Art,

Kang was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in April 2024 to support her work. In September, she staged a solo show titled Azaleas at Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles. In December, The New York Times named Kang one of ten "breakout stars" of 2024.

Kang mounted a solo exhibition in April 2025 at 52 Walker, an exhibition space in Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood owned by David Zwirner Gallery. In addition to several greenhouse installations and lengths of "tanned" photographic film suspended from the gallery ceilings, she exhibited a film installation in the basement made with strips of film stretched around a rotating rotary dryer used in photographic processing. ARTnews named the show the 8th best exhibition in New York that year.

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