Kang Seung Lee is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice examines erasure and invisibility, intergenerational community, and collective memory. Born in Seoul, South Korea, now living and working in Los Angeles, Lee gathers stories and organic materials from locations across continents, weaving communal counter-narratives of historical events such as the AIDS epidemic and traditional art forms such as ballet.
In the weeks leading up to his solo exhibition, Body of Memory, on view at Alexander Gray Associates, I had the chance to speak with Lee regarding his research-based process and relationship to his subjects and collaborators. We sat down to discuss embodied memory, the silence of the archives, and the relationship between queer histories and ecology.
Emma Fiona Jones: I’m intrigued by the role of organic materials in your work. I was really struck by your project collecting seeds, plants, and soil from cruising grounds such as Elysian Park and Fort Road Beach, this really elegant way of gesturing to transnational queer communities. What is the significance of sourcing and integrating organic materials, and how do you see the relationship between the natural and artificial in your work?
Kang Seung Lee: A lot of times, organic materials that I bring into my work are site-specific. They are often intentionally mentioned through captions or text, ensuring an entryway for the viewer. A lot of times, they are sourced from sites of queer memory, where I believe memories live on through non-human objects or organic materials. Elysian Park [in Los Angeles] is one of them—it’s a very well-known cruising ground of the past, but also the present. It’s an ongoing cruising ground for certain demographics.
I’m interested in histories that have not been written or been excluded from mainstream history. We often think of it as human failure that we weren’t able to write these histories—particularly relating to certain periods of queer history, like the AIDS epidemic. I’m looking at organic materials as witnesses to these historical events.
I’m also really interested in seeds and dried plants, in that they are constantly in the process of transformation or regeneration throughout the process of seeding and decaying, yet they come back the following year in different forms. They are not necessarily the same plants, but they are a different generation—there’s this genealogy that can be addressed through that process.
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