For the first time, Bulgari is the exclusive partner of the Venice Biennale, the world’s biggest celebration of contemporary art. Its inaugural pavilion, right by the entrance at the Giardini is a small but spectacular structure that has been constructed in accordance with its chosen artist, the Canadian Lotus L Kang, whose multidisciplinary work was last seen in the UK at her solo show at Chisenhale Gallery in 2023.
Lotus L Kang: ‘The Face of Desire is Loss’ – the making of, New York, courtesy Bulgari
Titled ‘The Face of Desire is Loss’, the starting point of the presentation is an adaptation of a line by the contemporary poet Lara Mimosa Montes, whose collection Thresholes examines what’s left when thinking about loss and mourning. The show itself is an exploration of the absence of things as an opportunity. “I’m trying to give form to emptiness; the void,” says Kang. “It’s about how to speak the unspeakable.”
Lotus L Kang: The lotus root outside the Bulgari Pavilion. ‘The Face of Desire is Loss’
Indeed, the void holds a particular fascination for the artist. The lotus root is a recurring motif in her practice – recognisable by the holes that characterise its form. These holes are echoed in the very structure of the show: the pavilion is a glass, cuboid room, which appears to be held together by steel joists that run in regular fashion across the ceiling. But, the beams themselves have large holes, from which the rest of the installation is suspended. As in the lotus root, these holes lend an incredible strength to the beams, and turn on its head our conception of what their purpose is. They have become spaces not of loss but of creation.
The Bulgari Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale
Kang, who speaks to me twice – once while she is installing, and again to show me around the pavilion, is softly spoken, erudite and considerate. The New York-based artist has partnered again with the curator Matthew Hyland, with whom she worked at Chisenhale and Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery, and the traces of previous shows thread its way through this commission.
For the last four years, Kang has been using greenhouses to tan what she terms “skins”: large sheets of photographic film that have not been stabilised. While these are usually treated in darkrooms, being in this environment means that the film is reactive to the environment around it, taking on traces of light, humidity, and materials. At Venice, the pavilion itself, with its glass walls, resemble that greenhouse structure; Kang hangs lengths of film from the joists that are exposed to natural sunlight, and the sheets will change according to the movement and number of bodies in the room. “It captures cycles of time and growth, death and rebirth; the film inside will change quite drastically,” she explains. The sheets began a deep purple colour and by the time I see it, in the opening week of the Biennale in May, they have already begun to fade into a variety of hues, what Hyland has called “bodily colours”: bruise, blood and bile. “There is a metaphor for the body at the core of this work,” says Hyland. “Skeletons, skins; how we are constituted by and are shaped by our environment; the porousness of who are as beings.”
Lotus L Kang: 35mm film on the façade of the Bulgari Pavilion.
Kang has wrapped the façade of the pavilion with stripes of 35mm film, translucent stills taken in 2023 that depict mudflats in Saemangeum, a coastal area on the Yellow Sea in South Korea, known for its history of migration. This is choreographed to a score that references a poem ‘Already’ by Kim Hyesoon, who thinks about the liminal space between death and rebirth. When the sun shines, it projects ghosts of these images into the pavilion, the impression of which will, in turn, affect the skins. There are also interventions in unexpected places that require you to engage beyond the obvious: above the joists, or on the floor there are objects such as tatami mats (as Hyland explains: “mattresses are places where we rest, recover, make love, we often die in a bed. These forms are sedimentary, but they accrue traces of the past – bodies and times and places they’ve moved through”), and 49 bottles of spirits lined up around the perimeter that represent the number of days between death and rebirth in Buddhist thought.
Lotus L Kang. ‘The Face of Desire is Loss’, courtesy Bulgari
Laura Burdese, Bulgari’s deputy CEO, had seen Kang’s work at the Whitney Biennial and knew she wanted to bring one big artist to the Giardini itself. “We wanted to give the artist the space to express their own sensibility on the themes of metamorphosis, change and time,” she tells me. “Lotus wanted to create a piece of art that was changing: a kind of living piece of art that every moment would be different. We loved that concept – to have created something which is deeply alive.”
For Burdese, supporting the Biennale for the next three iterations is about legacy: “contributing to creating a brighter future for the next generations. Art and culture elevate life by lifting the soul.”
‘The face of desire is loss’ by Lotus L Kang, commissioned by Bulgari, as part of the La Biennale Venezia runs from 9 May – 22 November 2026.
