Scaffold

2022 - Sculpture (Sculpture)

4.5 x 46 x 111 cm

Lotus Laurie Kang

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Scaffold by Lotus Laurie Kang features a seemingly disjointed amalgamation of materials between flat fabrics and lumps of aluminum. However, the simplest arcane gesture presented in the work oscillates sculptural syllabary and verse that mysteriously run through and connotes the artist’s personal, cultural, and diasporic history. Installed on the floor with a humble combination of folded burlap bags, commonly found in Korean construction sites or markets, and aluminum cast lotus roots, a common ingredient in traditional Korean cuisine. The work’s sculptural mode is imbued with diasporic cultural memories derived from floor engagement of Korean culture, as well as a certain gaze over the root lumps that summons alienation and attachment in immigrant families. Scaffold reveals an oddly intriguing estrangement in its poetic sculptural presence through its implementation of unfamiliar material agglutination. The materials used in other work in the same series are adapted from old Korean kitchen utensils, humble mesh bags, and vegetables—extensions of Asian women’s laboring bodies that linger and represent a material translation of the ungraspable time of an earlier generation.

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Lotus Laurie Kang works with sculpture, photography, and site-responsive installation. Known for their sprawling installations and distinctive material repertoire, Kang’s practice is a dialogue with impermanence and entropy. Elegantly disordered and richly layered, their site-sensitive works explore the relational bonds between time, personal history, and cultural knowledge. These works seek to disrupt a human-centered perspective of the world with a broad curiosity for life and matter tangled in states of exchange that produce and are reproduced by their environments. Rather than a prescriptive or reiterative approach, their practice is one of regurgitation.

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Colors:

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• culture.n.01
• history.n.01
• food.n.01
• memory.n.01
• materiality.n.02