Lotus L. Kang: I hear the hollow boom of time

The Frye Art Museum presents the largest museum show to date of Lotus L. Kang, featuring major installations created for the exhibition together with a presentation of works on paper. Developed in direct response to the museum’s architecture, Kang is conceiving two atmospherically distinct installations that explore the mutable qualities of film, unfolding across separate galleries: one bright and one dark. 

Working across photography, sculpture, and installation, she responds to the sensitive surfaces and reactive qualities of her materials, relating them to the human body’s resiliency and permeability. For the Frye, Kang will create an immersive, site-sensitive installation from industrial-sized sheets of unfixed photographic film the artist calls “skins.” Interested in the generative possibilities of misusing materials, she exposes the film to varying light and humidity conditions across multiple locations, a process she refers to as “tanning.” The sheets’ striated bands of warm flesh-toned colors evoke bruises and secretions like bile and blood—marks of a body’s movements and encounters. Physical impressions of the films’ surroundings also appear on their surfaces, such as a splash of rain or the ghostly form of cast aluminum anchovy-shaped chimes that once hung nearby.  

Sculptures using tatami mats as their foundation punctuate the spaces between the suspended film skins.  The mats function as containers for bodies in shifting states: resting, dreaming, recovering, expiring. Objects cast in materials such as aluminum, plaster, and bronze rest atop the tatami, while photographs are concealed within their folds—a placement that mirrors the way the body holds traces of time.  Throughout the immersive space, the artist merges physical experience with incomplete memories to create what she calls “generative absences." 

The second work is a new iteration of Azaleas, a kinetic sculpture inspired by a rotary film dryer, a machine typically used to process film rather than screen it. The artist tautly wraps bands of 35 mm film around a rotating metal drum that conjures a rib cage. Unlike a conventional projector, the sculpture simultaneously illuminates each frame of the filmstrip, which depicts roses. As the floral images envelop the space and are altered by the bodies moving through it, the film’s subject becomes tantalizingly illegible. Without a beginning or an end, the abstracted imagery circulates in a perpetual state of becoming. 

The sculpture’s rotations are timed to the rhythm of lines from two poems: a stanza from Kim Sowol’s “Azaleas” (1925) and Kim Hyesoon’s “Already” (2016). In crafting this piece, Kang read English translations of the poems but composed the score from the original Korean, a practice she characterizes as a “translation-regurgitation.” Acknowledging that her process inevitably entails some loss of the poems’ original meanings, she imbues the work with a sense of absence. 

Titled after a line from Clarice Lispector’s experimental text Água Viva (1973), the exhibition embraces a sense of in-betweenness, both spatially and conceptually. Exploring leaky boundaries—between inside and outside, life and death, deterioration and regeneration—the artist creates works that refuse stasis. As Kang states, “we are porous beings . . . always in a state of becoming in relation to other bodies and the environment around us.” 

Lotus L. Kang: I hear the hollow boom of time is organized by Georgia Erger, Curator, Frye Art Museum. 

About the Frye Art Museum 
Founded in 1952, the Frye is Seattle’s free art museum, bringing together art and new ideas within a stunning Olson Sundberg Kundig-designed building in historic First Hill. The museum connects Seattle with the art and artists of our time. We collect, exhibit, program, and build community around a wide range of modern and contemporary art, with a special focus on amplifying the voices of living artists. Learn more at fryemuseum.org