Through a dynamic interplay of sculptural installation and staged photography, Yi Hsuan’s works blur the boundaries between image and object as they probe and tease the limits of materiality, embodiment, and perception through their tactility. Each piece is a kind of photo-sculpture—an experiment with making photographs constructed from layered materials that themselves bear the traces of touch, irregularity, and recovery. The works seem to twist and torque themselves into being as Yi Hsuan places materials in contorted, almost acrobatic configurations over barely visible bodies, pushing against the limits of their own forms.

Though often fragmented or partially obscured, the figures represented are self-portraits, while the materials are all found or repurposed items salvaged from the trash or gathered discarded fragments from everyday life. This process carries personal and cultural significance for the Yi Hsuan, whose use of discarded material reflects an ongoing engagement with the immigrant experience: building a sense of belonging to the land is established through connecting with these materials. Through gestures of repair, reassembly, and recontextualization, these remnants accrue new purpose and presence. Combined with the echoes of the artist herself, they hint at the improvisational creativity inherent in Yi Hsuan’s own sense of self and re-creation.

Visually, the work nods to Surrealism’s psychological distortions and Cubism’s fractured viewpoints; yet, it  exceeds those legacies by insisting on the body as something unruly, mutable, and spiritually composite, as You Become a Fuzzy Fire vigorously explores. Tensed, uneven, and unsettled, Yi Hsuan’s process animates each work from within, their undulating rhythms evoking a sense of breathing or uncannily returning your gaze. Thus, photographic layers do not operate in service of representation, rather, they index the pulse and complexity of the body. These effects bring us beyond a single picture plane that asks us to visually navigate an undulating architecture whose cavities and extensions conjure  bodily interiors and sculptural voids. Yet even as these works engage three-dimensional form, Yi Hsuan insists they remain resolutely photographic in their attention to framing, light, and frontal disposition. The tension between surface and depth becomes their central drama. In each, the layered image strains against its own flattening, while the sculptural mass that entangles it aspires to the slipperiness of photographic representation.

Some of the works are strategically carved to form recesses that interrupt these strata of image substrates, slicing through layers that act as supports as much as portals that open onto undefined spaces. These openings intentionally disrupt spatial coherence, allowing glimpses of secondary images that hover between inside and outside. In other works, objects are organized to fold over and under unexplained shadows in an optical illusion that plays with virtual tactility. In Avoid and Expansion #2, a soft protrusion physically dominates the figure and balloons outward like a swelled lung before a large exhale. The works continually refers back to the body through their fleshy tones, irregular contours, and a palpable sense of movement, with each work appearing to gather as a living surface.

Yi Hsuan’s work invites viewers to move between optical and physical forms, image and body, material and meaning to witness how the photographic form can be displaced and reconfigured into a precarious balancing of various material, virtual, and spiritual particles that tilt, lean, and strain against gravity. These works ask us to inhabit the spaces in between and to linger in the fissures and folds where the body, with its instabilities, experiences, and transformations, continues to manifest. 

ABOUT YI HSUAN LAI

Yi Hsuan Lai (b. 1988, Taiwan) is a lens-based artist who 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.