(1) Lotus L. Kang. Receiver Transmitter (Inside you there is another you, II). 2024. Tatami mat, cast aluminium enlarged kelp knot, pigmented silicone, polypropylene, nylon, cast bronze lotus tubers, polypropylene tarp, silk, Face by Kim Hyesoon, photographs from the series ‘Fleshing Out the Ghost’. 29.84 × 217.17 × 94.61 cm. Courtesy of the artist. (2) Heidi Lau. Mercury Orb Vessel. 2024. Glazed Ceramic. 103.51 x 45.72 x 45.72 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Date: Wednesday, 26 March 2025
Time: 9.30AM – 11.30AM
Location: The China Club, Level 14, Old Bank of China Building, Bank Street, Central, Hong Kong
*Conversation starts at 10am
New York-based artists Lotus L. Kang and Heidi Lau shared their unique approaches to materiality in their process-driven and conceptually complex practices. Lau works primarily with ceramics to manifest the nonlinearity of time and memory, creating a tension between ephemerality and tactility. Kang’s contingent and iterative multimedia installations engender a state of perpetual becoming, reflecting the porosity of embodiment and lived experience. Deeply influenced by their diasporic backgrounds, Kang and Lau intimately connected their personal trajectories to their chosen materials, conceiving of identity as plural and constantly shifting. Tender yet durable, vulnerable and audacious, Lau and Kang’s works sublimate the artists’ physical labour and conceptual gestures into stories of metamorphosis.
Moderated by Xiaoyu Weng, Artistic Director of TAF, the event inaugurates TAF’s Conversation Series.
About TAF Conversation Series
Developed to manifest the foundation’s process-based and research-driven programming, TAF Conversation Series engages artists and their collaborators to respond, reflect, and shape TAF’s research concerns. Intently blurring the line between the work-in-progress and its finished form, TAF Conversation Series highlights the process and flux of artistic practice, where transformation is constant. TAF’s 2025 / 2026 research rubric is Materiality.
About the Artists
Lotus L. Kang
Lotus L. Kang (b. 1985 Toronto) works with sculpture, photography, and site-responsive installation. Known for her sprawling installations and distinctive material repertoire, Kang’s practice is a dialogue with the impermanent and the in-between.
Solo exhibitions include Already, 52 Walker, New York, US (forthcoming), Azaleas, Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, US (2024); In Cascades, Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, CA (both 2023); Fleshing Out The Ghost, Deborah Schamoni, Munich, DE (2023); Mesoderm, Franz Kaka, Toronto, CA (2023); Molt (New York-Lethbridge-Los Angeles-Toronto-Chicago-), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, US (2023), among others. In 2025, Kang will present a solo exhibition at 52 Walker in New York, US. Select group exhibitions include 2024 Whitney Biennial: Even Better Than the Real Thing, The Whitney Museum, New York, US (2024); After Images, Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin, DE (2024); Key Operators, Kunstverein Munich, DE (2024); Memory Work, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, US (2023); 2021 Triennial: Soft Water Hard Stone, New Museum, New York, US (2021), among others. Work by Kang is held in prominent institutional collections worldwide, including the Art Gallery of Ontario; Cc Foundation, Shanghai; Kadist Art Foundation; Tanoto Art Foundation, Singapore; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Fondazione Bonollo Arte Contemporanea, Thiene; Rivoli Due Fondazione per l’Arte Contemporanea, Milan; Wrocław Contemporary Museum, Wroclaw; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Heidi Lau
Heidi Lau (b. 1987, Macau) grew up in Macau and lives and works in New York. Lau’s sculpture practice views clay as the ideal conduit to explore the malleability and materiality of time. Her hand-built formations of clay meld a zoomorphic sensibility with the totemic presence of ritual items and primordial monuments. Drawing upon mythological, historical, and environmental source narratives, Lau’s work suggests anti-categorical, pluralistic imaginings of material and space, channeled through personal memory.
Selected solo and two person exhibitions include Chrysalis Spectre, with Leelee Chan, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2024); A Cacophony of Rocks, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York (2024); Shadow Speak, with Biraaj Dodiya, Bureau, New York (2023); Gardens as Cosmic Terrains, Green-Wood Cemetery, New York (2022); Spirit Vessels, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2020); The Primordial Molder, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2017); and The Obscure Region II, Macau Art Museum, Macau (2014), among others. Recent group exhibitions include Shanshui: Echoes and Signals, M+ Museum, Hong Kong (2024); Cosmos Cinema: The 14th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2023); Liquid Ground, UCCA, Beijing (2022); Liquid Ground, Para Site, Quarry Bay, Hong Kong (2021), among others. Lau is one of six artists shortlisted for the M+ Museum’s Sigg Prize 2025 and will be featured in an exhibition with other finalists in September. Work by Lau is included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art; CC Foundation, Shanghai; Kadist Art Foundation; the Bronx Museum of the Arts; Macao Museum of Art, and the M+ Museum in Hong Kong. In 2019, Lau presented Apparition for the Macau-China Collateral Exhibition at the 58th Venice Biennale.
