Yi Hsuan Lai exhibits her works in a solo show at SoMad, a femme- and queer-led art space that serves as a platform for emerging artists to experiment, collaborate, and challenge conventions. SoMad comprises a combined gallery and artist residency program, a production house, and an event space. The name “SoMad” reflects both the physical location — south of Madison Square Park — and the collective’s frustration with the current landscape of resources and support structures available for emerging artists, particularly artists from marginalized communities.
The exhibition Rubber Rubber is a delightful, sensual, and mesmerizing exhibition of photography and sculptural installations. Using a found material, the artist produces images of the body by altering its configuration and allowing the viewer to complete the form of the flesh in their mind. What is the body? What is flesh? How does it relate to the identity of the person, perhaps in opposition to the mind or the soul that dictates its movements?
We humans find the human body deeply enticing, which may be why, even in a future filled with other possibilities, we would still choose to be born as humans, a kind of collective evolutionary decision. It is possible to argue that Lai’s works are ideologically aligned with post-humanism, which places the human, nature, and the machine on different yet equal planes of existence. In the future (and even now), robots could emulate humans by adopting a soft material like silicone to stand in for flesh.
The word “silicone” in the title reveals that the aesthetic object subject to the artist’s configurations is, in fact, rubber. Why did Yi Hsuan Lai turn to this giant piece of cut rubber to investigate the flesh and the body? How does rubber capture the essence of flesh that is alive, moving, and feeling?
In a way, the rubber piece is more “alive” than a slice of meat because rubber, though already a lifeless object, captures the core nature of living flesh – its capacity to move, to be malleable and flexible, to respond to touch, like human skin. The body consists of flesh, bones, and muscle. The bones provide the skeletal structure, and the muscles serve as motors; together they enable us to express different configurations of the body — poses, gestures, and movements. The flesh, as the outer layer, becomes as a symbolic boundary between the external and the internal, while also facilitating touch and sensuality.
Yi Hsuan Lai’s photographs of these experimental forms capture the essence of the body and flesh by pursuing a non-literal depiction of the body, one that operates as a symbolic metaphor. The work is reminiscent of Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965), which presents a literal chair, a verbal definition of the chair, and an image of a chair. Kosuth asks: What is the true nature or representation of the chair? Lai, in turn asks: What is the true nature of the body?
Yi Hsuan Lai’s Residual Glitter (2025) suggests the breaking of glass panes that fall to the floor in a glitter-like cascade, conveying a striking juxtaposition of beauty, violence, and the beauty within violence that the body can sustain. Think of Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass (1915–1923), also titled The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Duchamp’s masterpiece depicts an erotic encounter between the “Bride” and nine “Bachelors,” and famously shattered during transport—after which Duchamp chose not to replace the broken glass, perhaps because he recognized the beauty produced by the violence of the shattering.
Vocal (2025) appears to depict a medical or laboratory setting, with the body on an exam table. The artist is exploring all facets of the body — its biological nature and, by extension, its medical and scientific dimensions. Does the body retain its poetic and intimate glamour under the scientific gaze within a clinical environment? Or does it become a grotesque amalgamation, half machine and half meat?
Reversed Confrontational (2025) is a modern play on the traditional conception of the nude in Western painting, referencing works such as Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863). Leaning sideways with an arm protruding downward to maintain balance, the body is deconstructed and reconstructed into an elegant photographic collage. Yi Hsuan Lai’s photography occupies a sweet spot between the triad influences of surrealism, figuration, and abstraction.
The work, although engaged with the body, nudity, desire, and the flesh, elevates its subject through the denial of specificity and through abstraction, surrealistic metaphors, and suggestive forms. For comparison, Lai’s work is akin to nudity and fantasy without the pornography. It is a highly elevated and controlled form of human expression, despite dealing with a subject matter that could easily drift into cruder manifestations. (On a separate but related note, Nobuyoshi Araki’s direct photographs of Japanese women involved in BDSM from the 1980s to the 2010s stand in stark contrast to Yi Hsuan Lai’s abstract and intellectually engaged approach. Araki’s work is raw and immediate, while Lai’s remains mediated and conceptual. This contrast shows that there are many routes to addressing the body, flesh, and desire, in which both Araki and Lai employ mimesis and re-presentation, but at different levels or layers of meaning.)
It is then safe to say that Yi Hsuan Lai captured the essence of the human body by photographing the sculptural manipulation and reconfigurations of the rubber piece — a “malleable material–aesthetic object,” understood here as an interpretive term for the material the artist engages with. Only by exploring the body through non-body materials and objects could the artist reveal its hidden layers and meanings through photographs and installations. It is just as Sigmund Freud had to study subjects deemed outside the “normal” so that he could define the true nature of human psychology through comparison and contrast.
The body is pulsating and alive, breathing and moving, feeling and touching. All of this is contained in the visuals and metaphors the artist employs. Despite originating from a uniquely Northeast Asian and Chinese perspective, the artist aims for a universal experience and expression concerning the body, which has traditionally been subdued, hidden, and censored within Northeast Asian and Confucian cultures. There has been a long need for Northeast Asian people to embrace their sexuality and bodily desires through an abstracted visual language and a mode of psychological expression elevated toward refinement. This refined approach to the body allows Lai to address desire and fantasy without resorting to literal or pornographic representations, achieving a level of articulation that is conceptually clear while acknowledging the body’s emotional and tactile realities.
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Rubber Rubber is a solo exhibition of Yi Hsuan Lai’s photography at SoMad (34 E 23rd St, 3rd Floor, New York, NY), on view until December 18. The gallery is open Monday to Friday, from 12 to 6 PM. (Weekends by appointment only )
About the Writer: Chunbum Park, also known as Chun, is a writer, artist, and photographer from South Korea, where they were born in 1991. Park has written for the New Visionary Magazine, Two Coats of Paint, Tussle Magazine, XIBT Magazine, and others. They completed their MFA in Fine Arts Studio from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2022. Park’s graduate thesis dealt with the merging of gender fluidity, anti-racist aesthetics, and Northeast Asian beauty in their art. They also interview artists at the Emerging Whales Collective.
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