Lotus L. Kang Receiver Transmitter (Borne), 2025

Two tatami mats are folded and stacked, wrapped in industrial rubber, obscuring immediate recognition. Objects such as cast aluminum perilla leaves, yellow cellophane, bottles of spirits and photographs hidden in the tatami’s folds are arranged in and around the mats.

A chorus of plaster and metal cast baby birds, crying open mouthed and awaiting nourishment sit atop the sculpture. The birds, exposed and new, are both full of life and yet precarious in their vulnerable state. They show a volatile in-between stage of development, and symbolize inheritance, regurgitation and transformation. They embody a relentless longing for the “mother” body in all its expansive forms.

The hidden photographs belong to the artist's Fleshing out the Ghost (2023) photographic series. Kang created this series during a thirty-eightminute performance on her thirty-eighth birthday, the age of her grandmother when she fled North Korea. In these photographs, Kang’s thirty-eight-cycle massages time to extrude interiority as ritual, a loophole communing present and past.