Casket
Mendes Wood, Germantown

June 27 – September 6, 2026

– Kim Hyesoon, “Going Going Gone,” Phantom Pain Wings (trans. Don Mee Choi, 2023)

Mendes Wood DM is pleased to present Casket, a presentation of new work by the Canadian-born, New York-based artist Lotus L. Kang.

Receiver Transmitter (Casket) (2026), a cast aluminum sculpture centering on avian bodies, a relatively recent motif in Kang’s practice, takes as its central image a bird nourishing through regurgitation. Non-human, its figures bear what are among the most shared of experiences of inheritance, loss, the passage from one generation to the next, the extreme newness of a life just begun, what a mother can pass on to her brood. Working to monumentalize this exchange, treating it as a process rather than a state of arrival or finality, Kang has been thinking about leakiness, regurgitation, and translation. The concepts find their most literal form in the act of feeding, one body passing what it holds into another. What cannot be contained, that leakiness in existence, gives the work its model of inheritance, the messy, formless business of passing something on. This movement between bodies runs through the parent first, the sculpture’s central act making literal what inheritance generally keeps figurative. Threading grief and desire, Kang has been thinking about what exceeds language and the body, and what escapes christens the work as a form of inheritance in its own right. Leakiness touches on what Julia Kristeva calls the abject, what an “I” must expel in order to be an “I” at all, a phantasmatic substance that clings too close to be simply foreign. In Kristeva’s account, this state appears both before separation from the mother and after it, when the subject risks collapsing into objecthood, as in the figure of a corpse.

The dimensions of Receiver Transmitter (Casket)’s concrete plinth are cast to the exact measurements of a burial coffin, and forty-nine cast kelp knots appear across the sculpture like a structural and conceptual scaffolding, referencing the bardo in Buddhist tradition in which forty-nine marks the days between death and rebirth. The kelp, a foodstuff drawn from the sea, sieve-like in its filtering, is also available as a sign of a tie that comforts and a tangle difficult to release, bridging to the “washing of the path,” knots untied after someone passes. Iris Murdoch found her way to a similar thought, critical of human arrangements as “nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.” “Time, like the sea,” she writes in The Sea, the Sea (1978), “unties all knots,” setting the human and the cultural against the sea’s undoing, its loosening of what people try to bind, what we try to steady. The sea carries something of a lifeblood and a force of undoing at once, carrying unrooted plants that migrate from place to place. Receiver Transmitter (Casket) plays with dualities and mirrorings, the birds repeating top and bottom, heads facing out on each side, as if reflected on water. The title carries a related double sense, a casket as a container for the dead, but also, in an older meaning of the word, a small box for what is precious and kept, a jewel box for keepsakes. The birds are based on the small ceramic birds Napco Ceramics produced through the postwar decades. Bridging memory, liminal time, The hollow boom of time (4:00; 7:19) (2026), the accompanying wall sculpture, is a circular piece set with small bird figures, cast aluminum ears, and a strip of 35mm film. Its surface is a perforated disc, round as a clock face, though its movement betrays conventional time, pierced through with many small holes. The film is a record of the past in the most literal sense; an image already captured, already fixed, now folded back into a new work. Each figurine is placed roughly at the artist’s own birth-time and her mother’s, the disc’s circularity standing in for the gap between places, times, or states. Holes mark the body’s most vulnerable points, the places where inside and outside fail to stay separate, an idea Mary Douglas developed in Purity and Danger (1966) in relation to ritual purity and bodily margins; an ear is one such hole, taking in sound it cannot refuse, much as a mouth takes in whatever is fed to it. The hollow boom of time (4:00; 7:19)’s perforated surface, like Receiver Transmitter (Casket)’s plinth, signifies as much as it supports. The surface shifts with the light in the room, at moments close to a mirror, holding the viewer’s reflection, a vessel for images, the reflections offered as distorted, riddled, at other moments dulling back into plain metal. Khōra (χώρα), a receptacle or matrix in which forms take shape, carries the nourishing, womb-like sense Kristeva develops in Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), the maternal, pre-linguistic space before the child enters language and social pretense, oriented instead by drives and rhythms dictated by the maternal body. Receiver Transmitter (Casket) and The hollow boom of time (4:00; 7:19) are khōra, then, in that they keep becoming something other, and so, primordially true to themselves, remain new and in-between. Within Kang’s conceptual framework, grief and rebirth are never far apart, the forty-nine knots, the bardo, the living tied to their dead, knots of pain and their untying, or Murdoch’s sea, which suggests a loosening, what was bound coming free to move again, to be retired, spilled, refiled, or otherwise.