Kang Seung Lee’s Body of Memory uses an array of visual and tactile materials to ask the questions that perhaps all queer art must ask in the purported aftermath of the AIDS crisis: what does it mean to mourn the loss of a body to processes of aging when that body has survived the apex of the plague years? How can one do so without mocking the dead? Can age even be understood as loss, or is such a thought perverse after AIDS?
Individual drawings, hung panels of wood veneer upon which objects both organic (wood, shell) and manmade (drawings, twine, and cloth hangings) are mounted, and a large wooden platform with similar mounted objects in the middle of the floor comprise the installation. Organic materials live and die, they bloom and rot as bodies do. Lee’s use of veneer exemplifies this transience; the wood is marked by burls, signs of the tree’s disease or injury, scars of sorts. Despite its apparent sheen, the veneer’s beauty is not derived from newness but rather from processes of growth and degeneration.
The installation abounds with intertexts and references, none more persistent than Robert Glück’s 2023 book, About Ed, a narrative about his experiences treating the loss of his lover and friend Ed Aulerich-Sugai. Glück’s words feature prominently in a video of Meg Harper, a dancer over eighty years old, on view in an adjacent room. A small, hanging banner is embroidered with a phrase from the book: “Die with the Living, Live with the Dead.” Body of Memory is Lee’s ever-meticulous, care-full (the work of care being essential here) attempt to do as Glück tells him.
Something surprisingly Victorian—in all the best ways—characterizes Lee’s assemblages, even though his orderly aesthetic shares little with typical, chockablock Victorian interiors. There is something of the nineteenth-century scrapbook about his sensibilities or, better yet, the specimen collection. One might think of the three-dimensional wood panels as shadow boxes. One drawing hews closely to a William Morris pattern.
The idea of living with the dead called to my mind a seminal Victorian text, Charles Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864–65). The novel opens with a scene of a man dredging the Thames for things that might be sold, for corpses that might still be burdened with money. Lee is also a mudlark of sorts, gathering his organic materials as he does from parks, cruising spots, the homes of his subjects.
Lee’s work is an assemblage of body parts brought into intimate proximity with the viewer: eyes, nipples, patches of skin whose lesions simultaneously gesture towards the blotches of age and the veritable stigmata of Kaposi sarcoma, so often AIDS-related. Even in the video of Harper, before she dances, a series of close-ups catalogues craggy, hair-ridden, crepe-y, stiff, and shuddery body parts. We see what each part is, or what it has come to be, before we are amazed by what it can do. Fragmentation and disarticulation evoke Dickens’s Mr. Venus, an “articulator of bones,” who collects discarded, amputated, or “found” body parts to create salable skeletons. Lee, too, is a kind of articulator of bones, but he seeks not to make new wholes (would that even be possible?). Rather, he picks up the pieces, takes stock of them, and arranges them, often using ritual materials, into something meaningful, even sacred.
