Lotus L. Kang Molt (Woodridge-New York-Berlin-), 2024 - 2025

Lengths of unfixed industrial film— “skins” as Kang refers to them—are draped over and across raw steel tubes suspended from the ceiling. The shadowy impressions on the film create layered, visceral timescales, rendered in a palette of yellow, orange, red, purple and brown.

By intentionally misusing the material, exposing it to sunlight and manipulating its exposure in both planned and unforeseen ways, the artist has invented modes of inscribing her process, turning the film into indexes of overlapping durations. The film is “tanned” ––or exposed––across multiple sites: her studio, her home, and predominantly, in a greenhouse situated in upstate New York. A structure that is not fully inside nor fully outside, the greenhouse embodies an in-between space that holds cycles of growth and decay.

Wooden pallets, mesh fabric, cardboard cut-outs, cast aluminum objects, splashes of rainwater, and the films' own folding and touching leave the sheets with cryptic, shadowy traces, their glossy surfaces marked by experimentation and time. The reflective quality of the film mirrors viewer and environment, offering a distorted echo of its surroundings.

The raw film alludes to early photography’s purpose of documentation. However, Kang subverts such associations by deconstructing the medium, emphasizing the alchemical, embodied, and sculptural.

For Kang, the unfixed and continually sensitive film resembles various membranes: cellular, plastic, textile, or synthetic. As her term “skins” suggests, the film is akin to the body’s largest organ. Worn on the outside rather than inside, it is strong and resistant yet vulnerable and absorptive. Skin is an active vessel: a connective, porous membrane where time is recorded and evidenced both legibly and illegibly. With their associations to bruise, blood or bile, the colors of the cascading film invoke the body’s fragility, resilience and leakiness.