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D aylight pours into the vast, industrial second floor of Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art where,
inside, a 13-foot greenhouse, erected in galvanized steel, imposes an architecture of its own upon the
space. Through the greenhouse windows, the light descends and settles upon a curious ecosystem of organic and
industrial forms arranged within it. The piece is Lotus L. Kang’s Receiver Transmitter (Butterfly), a site-responsive
sculptural installation commissioned for MOCA Toronto’s triennial exhibition, “GTA24.” Betraying a clear
sense of interiority and exteriority, transformation and fixedness, presence and void, Receiver Transmitter (Butterfly)
embodies a poetic materialization that defies singular interpretation.
For Kang, the greenhouse as a form bears a symbolic resemblance to the human body as a permeable space. “I
was thinking about this idea of a receiver transmitter as something that projects outwards but also something that
receives and absorbs,” says Kang, “as a kind of analogue for the body, as a kind of continually sensitive, porous
vessel or container.” By complicating the boundary between interior and exterior space, the greenhouse invites
impermanence, transformation, and contradiction.
The objects and materials arranged within the greenhouse similarly contain this poetic tension. Where
ordinarily kelp knots are small organic food items, here an enlarged, cast aluminum kelp knot serves as a sculptural
centrepiece. Lotus tubers are placed alongside kelp in what Kang describes as an “interplay between what is
rooted and what is unrooted.” Pigmented silicon, a tatami mat, cast aluminum anchovies, adzuki beans, nylon
thread, cored and dried apple slices—these are some of the materials which comprise Kang’s poetic arrangement.
Here, intentionally absent materials hold equal importance, the title itself alluding to butterflies though none
are present. Similarly, a series of photographs taken on Kang’s 38th birthday in an act of communion with her
grandmother, who fled North Korea at the age of 38, are contained somewhere within the sculpture, but aren’t
visible. In this way, Kang successfully materializes absence, void, and that which is intangible. “I’m really thinking
about what is seen and not seen, what is held in the body over time.”
“I’m trying to engage a deeper, body knowledge kind of level—things that are maybe harder to articulate into
language or experiences that are harder to articulate into language,” says the artist. At the same time, the piece is
psychologically charged. “It has a lot to do with memory, time, and containing things,” says Kang. “How what is
held in the body also changes, sediments, accrues, loses. All these things—what is gained and what is lost.”
Elegant, expansive, and precise, Receiver Transmitter (Butterfly) culminates as a kind of poetry made physical. “To
me this work feels like a poem,” says Kang, “each material feels like a word that’s both pointing to what the word
is in the world, but then also deflecting and becoming many things. And as you move around it—and this is the
power of sculpture—the words, or the materials, change in relation to each other.”
Intangible Constructs
Artist Lotus L. Kang’s latest sculpture explores the
greenhouse as a symbol of the human body.
By Najma Eno