Through his organic and human-centric works, KANG SEUNG LEE builds tributes to queer artists whose lives were cut too short by the AIDS epidemic. Building transnational connections between creatives from across the world, the South Korean artist links them through the prism of their shared activism.
With his latest exhibition Body of Memory, opening on the 26th of April at Alexander Gray Associates in New York, Lee looks at the subject of the ageing body as a vessel of memory about the queer figures. Collaborating with Meg Harper – a dancer who was an intrinsic part of the queer community of the 1980s and 1990s – on an exhibited film work entitled Skin, the artist showcases Harper in an unchoreographed dance, with collective memory running through her movement, wrinkles and scars.
The video is accompanied by a series of assemblage constellations, featuring a mix of organic materials, drawings and archival photographs. Using the seeming anonymity through displaying detailed close-ups of his subjects’ bodies, Lee highlights their absence in public awareness, in turn, aiming to end that very erasure and celebrate their legacy.
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