Time collapses in Kang Seung Lee’s solo show at Alexander Gray Associates, ‘Body of Memory’ – the South Korean-born, Los Angeles-based artist’s first presentation with the gallery. Across drawing, mixed-media assemblage and video, Lee considers the body – in particular, the queer body – as a vessel of remembrances and a personal archive. Focusing on skin, he characterizes aging as not a path towards death but as a continuous process of regeneration. In the film Skin (2024), Meg Harper, a dancer in her 80s, is seen performing from memory, her wrinkles evidence of the body’s capacity to be both weathered and resilient. Lee’s assemblages, meanwhile, pair visual references to queer history with wood veneer – the skin of trees – marked with traces of burl or knots. ‘These knots are formed through injury, through disease,’ Lee tells me. ‘This process, this trauma, creates something beautiful.’
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