In the project, I combine the medium of photography and sculptures to create both photographic and sculptural assemblage. I use fleshy Sculpey clay to build up altered and fragmented bodies as my subjects, aiming to create a dialogue between the ambiguous nature of the objects and the space depicted in photographs- photography is the pictorial representation of mental states.
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In the project, I combine the medium of photography and sculptures to create both photographic and sculptural assemblage. I use fleshy Sculpey clay to build up altered and fragmented bodies as my subjects, aiming to create a dialogue between the ambiguous nature of the objects and the space depicted in photographs- photography is the pictorial representation of mental states.
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A cactus
in the Chimney
Project Description
Project Description
12.02/25- 12.06/25
NADA Miami
SoMad Gallery is pleased to announce a selection of works by the Taiwanese-born, New York-based artist Yi Hsuan Lai at NADA Miami
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, perception, and virtual 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. Together they hold difficult poses that push 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.
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Visually, the work nods to surrealism’s psychological distortions and cubism’s fractured viewpoints, but 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 recall both 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.
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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 refer us 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.
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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.
