Artist Statement/ Biography

Yi Hsuan Lai combines photography and sculpture to create work that speaks to the physical and psychological experiences of self-identity and Otherness. The ambiguous and grotesque sculptures featured in her photographs are inspired by the representation, transformation and extension of the human body. She views photography as the pictorial representation of one’s mental states. She also plays with spatial relations by turning the photographs of objects back into objects themselves to further create dialogue between tangible sensibility and tactile ambiguity. Within this fluctuation between two and three dimensionality, she engages the thin line between psychology and physicality, making works that are at once animate and inanimate, self and the other, image and the thing.

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Yi Hsuan Lai (b,1988) is a visual artist from Taiwan currently working in New York. She recently completed her MFA in Photography and Related Video Media from School of Visual Arts. Her background in graphic design and documenting live theatre lead to her developing an artistic process that combines performance, staged self-portraiture, installation and sculpture-based photography. She explores the complexity of self-identity, as well as experimenting with representation of sensations through physical materials to capture an imagined world. Her work has been shown in Anonymous Town SPRING/BREAK Art Show (2020, New York), HERE Art’s In Visible Space (2020, New York), Deer Studio’s Body Language (2020, New York), Sugar Gallery’s Break A Leg in Photo-Emphasis (2019, Fayetteville).