Lotus Kang’s Venice Biennale pavilion will ask viewers to look twice — and then again, as the light changes.
The Canada-born, New York-based artist is creating The Face of Desire is Loss for Bvlgari’s pavilion at the Giardini’s Spazio Esedra, where the installation will run from May 9 to November 22, 2026. Kang’s façade treatment is especially striking: she will cover the exterior with 35mm unfixed film shot in mud flats in Korea, allowing the work to shift with the weather, the hour, and the angle of the sun.
Inside, Kang has assembled a group of works that extend her interest in unstable meanings and material contradiction. The pavilion will include plaster casts of crying baby birds, tatami mats wrapped in industrial rubber and tarp, and cast-aluminium pieces. The title, The Face of Desire is Loss, points to the emotional register of the project: attraction, fragility, and the uneasy space between wanting and relinquishing.
Kang, who is based in New York and was born in Canada, has built a practice around installations, photograms, and sculpture that combine organic and off-the-shelf industrial materials. She has said she resists fixed interpretations, preferring work that remains open and difficult to pin down. That approach was visible in In Cascades, her contribution to the Whitney Biennial in 2023, where large sheets of light-sensitive film rippled through the space. In 2023, she also presented a solo exhibition at Chisenhale in London, where she made rat-pup sculptures in glass.
Bvlgari’s support for Kang’s pavilion sits within a larger institutional strategy. The Italian house will sponsor the next three editions of the Venice Art Biennale, presenting the partnership as an extension of its idea of patronage rather than a one-off sponsorship. The company has framed that commitment as a way to support living artists alongside its longstanding work in cultural heritage.
At Venice, Kang’s installation will depend on movement, weather, and perception. That instability is the point. Rather than offering a single image or message, the pavilion will unfold as a sequence of shifting surfaces — a work that asks how desire is shaped, and how quickly it can turn into loss.
