Spirit Animals

Excerpt:

In the dark years of Yusin rule, from 1972 to 1979, when the South Korean president Park Chung-hee wantonly suppressed civil liberties, the poet So Chong-ju (1915–2000) wrote of his grandmother’s verandah, “as big as two sheets of paper.” Sometimes credited as the erstwhile father of modern Korean poetry, So held the verandah as a worthy object of commemoration: “I find this verandah, mirror of time and touch.” “Polished so often, the marks of so many hands have been worn away to a gleaming mirror, a mirror reflecting my young face.” The verandah persisted in So’s imagination as a thinly veiled challenge to the patriarchal trappings of Park’s authoritarian landscape and as a monument to matrilineal labor.

Looking at the mirrored floor of Receiver Transmitter (49 Echoes I) (2022–2025), I kept returning to So’s words. They guided me as well to the reflective surfaces Lotus L. Kang creates from tanning large sheets of photographic film she calls “skins.” Considered a form of damage, tanning transforms the photosensitive material into a repository of infinitesimal actions. More than the sum of their material parts or the chemical operations involved in their realization, works such as Molt (Woodridge-New York-) and In Cascades command a distinctly nonsecular presence...

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