Azaleas

Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles 

When you turn away from seeing me

and go,

gently, without a word, I shall send you away.

From Mount Yak in Yongbyon,

azaleas,

I shall gather an armful and scatter them on your way.

Step after step away

on those flowers placed

before you, press deep, step lightly, and go.

When you turn away from seeing me

and go,

though I die, no, not a single tear shall fall.¹

Commonwealth and Council presents Azaleas, Lotus L. Kang’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and at the gallery. Comprising two new site-responsive multimedia installations involving large-format and 35mm film, industrial materials, cast objects, sound, light, and movement, the show considers poetry as a conceptual structure and translation as an affective mode of becoming.

In 2002, the late great artist/provocateur Pope.L wrote in a text considering lack across economic, cultural, and political boundaries: “typically what cannot be seen is what we most like to see. Longing is my favorite material for engaging…”. ² This desire to make visible the invisible—the longing to know the unknowable—is one of the primary driving forces behind Kang’s work. An artist whose site-responsive installations occupy the hazy, the gestural, the atmospheric, and at times, the opaque, Kang’s embodied form of practice is energized by negotiations between what is figured and what is abstracted. Drawing from science fiction, feminist and decolonial theory, Eastern spirituality, and Chinese medicine, Kang’s work materializes identity as a web: a delicate, non-linear configuration of interrelated objects and energies that are in a continual process of forming and reforming.

Presented in the first gallery, Inside you there is another you is an installation that can be considered both body and cosmos. Encompassing a constellation of charged objects and materials—film, cast objects in aluminum, and soft materials including tatami mats and netting—the work brings discrete entities into relationship with one another, generating an intricate and balanced ecosystem. Kang’s signature sheets of unfixed large-format film are presented for the first time here with multiple anchor points. These “skins” in sunset hues of yellow, peach, red, and maroon tumble in gentle waves to the ground, continuously morphing as they are further exposed to natural and artificial light.

Borrowing its title from poet Kim Hyesoon,³ Inside you there is another you reflects Kang’s engagement with the individual body as it relates to larger social bodies. Though the artist’s own likeness is never fully articulated, it impresses upon her process as a unit of measurement and as a diffracted position. An enlarged kelp knot cast in aluminum reclines on a tatami mat next to a scattering of intervertebral discs, while casts of yellow croaker fishes, silvery anchovies, and lotus roots gesture towards the artist’s inherited knowledge, and the cultural significance around various forms of sustenance. Oscillating between what is clearly articulated and what is poetically felt, the installation parses the construction of identity through the multifarious nature of both personal and collective memory.

Published in 1925 during the period of Japanese colonial rule over Korea, Azaleas (Jindallaekkot) is a poem by the late Kim So-wol written from the perspective of a woman to describe the separation of a pair of lovers. Perennially featured in textbooks, adapted to songs, and interpreted in myriad ways over time, the poem has become an icon of Korean identity and renowned for its poignant expression of loss and longing.

In the second gallery, Kang’s Azaleas is an installation inspired by a rotary film dryer, consisting of a six by eight foot rotating drum, lights, 35mm film, wind chimes, and sound. Synchronized to the meter of Kim So-wol’s Azaleas (in Korean) and two lines from Kim Hyesoon’s poem, Face (in English), the drum spins forwards and backwards to a score born out of compression and translation. Each sequence of the drum’s rotations affects a simultaneous sense of disorientation and rooting; the poets’ words haunt in their absence while Kang’s own explorations of loss and lack permeate into the dark gallery. Made with crude construction materials including steel and aluminum, the central drum conjures an exaggerated rib cage–bound horizontally by hundreds of feet of celluloid film, and projecting an orbit of skeletal silhouettes onto the walls.

While originally intending to film azalea blossoms at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, due to the time of year, Kang was only able to capture rose bushes (images of which are now imprinted on the work’s 35mm celluloid). This accidental form of loss initiated thinking around the irrecuperable, both in terms of memory and desire; as a result, there are no azaleas that appear anywhere in the exhibition.

—Kate Wong

¹ Kim, So-wol. Azaleas, Translated by David R. McCann, Columbia University Press, 2007.

² Bessire, Marc H.C. William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist In America, MIT Press, 2002.

³ Kim, Hyesoon. A Drink of Red Mirror, Translations by Jiwon Shin, Lauren Albin, Sue Hyon Bae, Action Books, 2019.