Yi HsUan Lai

May 16

About

Yi Hsuan Lai, a Taiwanese lens-based artist based in New York, uses handmade sculptures, found materials, and her body in staged photography in two and three dimensions to explore 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). LensCulture recognized Lai's work among its Critics' Top 10 Choices in 2022.

Exhibition

Through photography and photographic collages, Gut Feeling explores the interplay between the body, 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, ephemeral quality mirrors the body's fluidity, the complexities of self-identity, and Otherness. Materiality sparks a dialogue between tangible sensibility and tactile ambiguity. 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 playfully arranges found, disposable objects and her body into assemblages. She then photographs these assemblages as still lifes and self-portraits for presentation in two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces. Some of these objects are displayed within the gallery space, adding a layer of theatrical embodiment to the already visceral experience of viewing strange, photographic yet intimate objects.

Through her lens, Yi Hsuan transforms once-unwanted objects into seductive, whimsical, fluid narratives, evoking moments of both amusement and bewilderment. She carefully manipulates scale, perspective, and composition to redefine the objects’ significance and essence. The mundane becomes extraordinary as the objects take on performative qualities, blurring the boundaries between object and body, human and non-human, animate and inanimate. This metamorphosis creates a feminine, psychological landscape in which the body serves as 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.