Lotus L. Kang creates installations that respond to the spaces they inhabit and reveal the surprising possibilities of ‘misused’ materials—specifically, the tools of photography. In her largest museum exhibition to date, she presents two major new installations alongside a series of works on paper, all developed in dialogue with the Frye Art Museum’s distinctive architecture.

Interweaving influences from poetry, translation, and the familial inheritance of her own Korean heritage, Kang works iteratively, revisiting forms and materials across her installations. For the Frye, she creates one of her “ghostly architectures,” installations featuring large sheets of industrial film that have been exposed to varied light sources in a process she calls “tanning,” likening the film’s sensitive surface to skin. These are hung and draped throughout the gallery, accompanied by sculptures made from tatami mats and cast objects. Secondly, she will present a kinetic sculpture: evoking an enlarged ribcage, a rotating drum wrapped in celluloid film projects shifting bands of color and light throughout the space, its motion following a rhythmic score based on the cadence of modern Korean poetry.

Together, these works explore how our bodies—and our cultural identities—are continually shaped and transformed by the environments we move through.