Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Floor 5

Born 1985 in Toronto, Canada 
Lives in New York, NY

Lotus L. Kang’s, In Cascades, welcomes viewers into a world situated between inside and outside, life and regeneration, and emptiness and fullness, suggesting a constant state of transformation. It consists of photographic films unfurling from steel joists suspended from the ceiling and a series of floor sculptures made of tatami mats and cast-aluminum objects. The materials are industrial, portable, modular, and open to change. Kang exposes the film—an inherently vulnerable material—to varying conditions of light in multiple locations. She refers to this process as “tanning,” likening the film surface to skin and bringing the material back to ideas of the body, particularly its permeable relationship with environments. By doing this, the artist hints at an unfixed understanding of one’s body, diasporic identity, and the processes of memory.