Yi Husan Lai

May 16

About

Yi Hsuan Lai, a Taiwanese lens-based artist now based in New York, incorporates handmade sculptures, found materials, and her body for staged photography in two and three dimensions, exploring themes of adaptation, uncertainty, and femininity.

She has received residency fellowships from Light Work (2024) and Vermont Studio Center (2023) and participated in the NYFA immigration program in 2023. Her solo exhibitions include NARS Foundation (2024), Gallery 456 (2024), and Spring Break Art Show (2020), with group exhibitions at Photo London (2023), Floor_Gallery (2023), Wassaic Project (2022), and Well Well Project (2022). Lai's work was recognized among LensCulture's Critics' Top 10 Choices in 2022.

Exhibition

Through photography and photographic collages, gut Feeling explores the interplay between body and objects and physical and psychological landscapes. Yi Hsuan uses discarded materials and her body to create assemblages for two three-dimensional photographs. The work's visceral and ephemeral quality mirrors the body's fluidity, complexities of self-identity, and Otherness. Materiality sparks a dialogue between tangible sensibility and tactile ambiguity in a space. Her work traverses construction and deconstruction, animate and inanimate, revaluing one-time-use materials into bodily and otherworldly representations.

In the exhibition "Ongoing Narratives—Go Left, Go Right or Go to the Other Side," Yi Hsuan employs a playful manner to arrange found, disposable objects and her body into assemblages. She then photographs these assemblages into still-life and self-portraits for presentation across two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces. Some of these objects are displayed within the gallery space, supplementing the already visceral experiences of viewing strange photographic yet intimate objects with an added layer of theatrical embodiment.

Through her lens, Yi Hsuan transforms once unwanted objects into seductive, whimsical, and fluid narratives, evoking moments of both amusement and bewilderment. She carefully manipulates scale, perspective, and composition to redefine the significance and essence of these objects. The mundane transcends into the extraordinary as the objects adopt performative qualities, blurring the boundaries between - object and body, human and non-human, animate and inanimate. This metamorphosis creates a feminine and psychological landscape where the body is a symbolic bridge between disparate elements.

Exploring relationships between objects, bodies, and their environments, Yi Hsuan tempts viewers to reconsider their perceptions of reality and imagination. She invites a deeper reflection on the intricacies of existence and the interconnectedness of all things.