All Ready Here

Excerpt:

I first saw Lotus L. Kang’s work in Toronto. I don’t remember the exact piece, but I remember the way it didn’t reach out. It stayed where it was. There was precision in the materials, but also a looseness around meaning. The work didn’t demand attention, but it held it. That kind of clarity—clarity that doesn’t need emphasis—stuck with me. It’s what led me to invite her to participate in the 2022 Toronto Biennial, and what continued to shape our conversations as this exhibition took form.

Already takes its title from a line in Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death: “You are already born inside death.” The exhibition doesn’t reference the line so much as move within its cadence. Time here doesn’t accumulate. It drifts and overlaps. Two greenhouses structure the space. One contains forty-nine objects—anchovies, lotus roots, soju bottles, twist ties, bronze kelp knots, mirrored surfaces. The number draws from Korean Buddhist rituals that mark the forty-nine days between death and rebirth. But nothing is staged as reenactment. The objects are placed in proximity, not in sequence. In the second greenhouse, a bulb rotates slowly around a rectangle of film and six bottles. The movement is unhurried. The light doesn’t always land...

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