Through staged photography and sculptural installation, Yi Hsuan Lai’s Rubber, Rubber investigates the materiality of perception and embodiment. As a foreigner in a new land, Lai works with overlooked objects, sensing in their rawness a potential for renewal and communal belonging.
Skin-like rubber forms are projected into space, interwoven with raw materials, found objects, and the artist’s own body. The projections behave like skin—thin, porous, intimate, and protective—while also expanding into shelters, spaces the body can inhabit, simultaneously as subject and architecture. These dynamic assemblages collapse distinctions between photograph and sculpture, surface and volume, creating ephemeral constructions that echo both psychological and corporeal landscapes.
A projection installation, revealed behind a curtain, activates the viewer’s imagination of what layers compose Lai’s photographs. Material tensions and abstracted depictions of the body create a disorienting experience in which boundaries dissolve, identity becomes fluid, and the surreal intimacy of inhabiting another consciousness becomes reality.
About Yi Hsuan Lai
Yi Hsuan Lai is a Taiwanese-born, New York–based visual artist whose practice merges photography, sculpture, found objects, and her own body. She creates staged, surreal assemblages that blur the boundaries between object and image, body and environment, surface and depth. Through this oscillation between two and three dimensions, Lai explores the intersection of objecthood, bodily projection, and psychological states. Her work engages themes of adaptation, uncertainty, and femininity, bridging the material and corporeal realms.
Yi Hsuan Lai received her MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in 2020. She has been awarded residencies from SoMad (New York, 2025), Light Work (Syracuse, 2024), the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT, 2023), and the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program (New York, 2023). Her recent solo exhibitions include NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, 2024), Gallery 456 (New York, 2024), and Spring Break Art Show (New York, 2020). She has also participated in group exhibitions at Photo London (London, 2023), Floor_Gallery (Seoul, 2023), the Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY, 2022), and Well Well Project (Portland, OR, 2022). In 2022, her work was recognized among LensCulture Critics’ Top 10.
