Yi Hsuan Lai’s photography explores the space between the body and the environment, where physical form serves as a canvas for psychological expression and negotiation. Through staged interactions with discarded and synthetic materials, she creates images that blur the lines between sculpture and photograph, surface and depth. Her work reflects themes of femininity and belonging, expressing an embodied visual language influenced by emigration and personal experience. Although tension and vulnerability are evident, they are balanced with subtle humour and playfulness. For Lai, the photograph serves as both a document and an object—a spatial construct that challenges perception and prompts viewers to rethink how bodies are framed, perceived, and experienced. “Through performative acts in the photograph, I question how the female body is framed, staged, and consumed.”

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The sculptured photographs by Yi Hsuan Lai are an investigation of the relationship between objects and the body, shaping them into environmental dialogues. “My work explores the interplay between physical form and psychological landscape, using the body, including my own, alongside found materials and environments as extensions of interior experience. I’m drawn to the interconnectedness between objects, space, and the body, shaping them into dialogues between corporeal and emotional states.”

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Her work fluctuates between two and three dimensions through straight photography and photographic installations. She creates staged self-portraits and still lifes using found or discarded materials, disposable objects, sculptural forms, and her own portraits. “These objects serve as proxies for the self—stand-ins that allow me reframe impermanence into sentient, psychological landscapes. Rooted in my experience as an emigrant and an Othered body, the worlds I create for the camera offer a shifting sense of belonging, where materials, objects, and bodies merge into unfamiliar territories.”

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Taiwanese-born, New York–based artist Yi Hsuan Lai draws on her personal experiences to infuse her work with emotional depth, especially her emigration. “My experience of emigration has shaped an ongoing sense of suspension. My work responds to this condition of constant shifting, adaptation, and negotiation, exploring how the body navigates instability and constructs a sense of belonging. The body becomes central: I see it as both shelter and extension, carrying memory while continuously negotiating its surroundings. Through a visceral visual language, I aim to move beyond linguistic barriers and connect through shared bodily experience.”

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Through photographed performative acts, I explore how the female body is framed, staged, and consumed.

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Constructed Femininity

In her work, she explores the visual traditions that influenced her childhood. “Growing up immersed in image traditions rooted in stereotypical representations of the female body, I challenge how femininity is seen and constructed. Through photographed performative acts, I explore how the female body is framed, staged, and consumed. From a feminine perspective, I question the visual conventions that shape conceptions of the female body. Through performative staging, I enact femininity through tactility and spatial construction. At the same time, I seek to create a reflective space where viewers can pause, engage with the work, and reflect on their own views on visibility and embodiment.”

Lai discusses her involvement in cultural discourse in a balanced manner. “I view my photography not as making direct statements but as altering perception. It participates in larger conversations about visibility, identity, and embodiment while creating psychological landscapes.”

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I view my photography not as making direct statements but as altering perception.

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Between Attraction and Discomfort

Through her sculptural photographs, fragility and transformation are crystallised into sensorial moments, she explains. “I extend the photograph into sculptural assemblages and spatial installations, allowing material and architectural conditions to expand the image beyond the frame. While the work carries tension and vulnerability, it also holds a sense of humour, allowing discomfort and playfulness to coexist.”

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Fragmentation and partial visibility are deeply embedded in her visual language, generating tension and disorientation. “These strategies reflect ongoing conditions of negotiation, protection, and instability that run throughout the work. I explore photography through materiality and spatial extension, letting tactile and spatial relationships shape the image into an embodied encounter. Expanding the photograph beyond the frame creates a push and pull between seeing and sensing, enabling the work to oscillate between visual perception and bodily awareness.”

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Awareness of Perception

Yi Hsuan Lai prefers to avoid assigning a fixed meaning and sees the viewers as active participants in creating meaning. She encourages them to make their own connections and uncover details gradually. “I like to create a sense of unfamiliarity in something that appears recognisable, adding a subtle visual twist that encourages people to pause and look twice.  My work often contains subtle humour and a touch of absurdity, creating a dynamic tension between attraction and discomfort.”

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In her spatial constructions, perception shifts between two- and three-dimensional forms, between objects and images, and between interior and exterior spaces. “It unfolds through texture, surface tension, performative action, and scale, generating conditions where viewers undergo a perceptual change, and where the image starts to behave like an object and the object like skin.”

Lai constructs spatial constructions that call for balance but leaves them unresolved. “My compositions are organised but inherently unstable. I frequently develop centred or stage-like arrangements, then disrupt them using layering, compression, and material tension. Instead of depicting neutral space, I craft psychological spatial constructions where bodies and objects engage in a quest for balance. Surface and depth are in constant flux, and stability is intentionally left unresolved.”

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Construction of Materials

Her scenes often include organic or discarded objects she finds. Specific materials and gestures recur, serving as anchors in her visual language. “I often use elastic materials like rubber, tubing, mesh, and balloons because they symbolise tension, stretching, and resistance. They are closely linked to the body, serving as metaphors for skin or even internal organs.”

Lai intuitively gravitates toward materials, initially reacting to texture, surface, or physical tension. Her subjects arise from interactions between the body and the material. “I’m especially drawn to discarded or synthetic materials because they carry remnants of use, effort, and temporality, which become woven into the image. The scenes are meticulously staged, often temporary, and their history is ultimately preserved through photography.”

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By emphasising texture and tactility, Lai evokes the viewer’s desire for closeness. “I interpret materials originally designed for single use as representations of the body and the supernatural, highlighting fragility and desire. My compositions serve as gateways for viewers to recognise themselves and be recognised, prompting reflection on the fluidity of bodies and experiences as they seek connection in a transient physical realm.”

She shapes her work by the found materials she encounters. “I respond intuitively to what is physically present around me, including ready-made objects, discarded materials, and architectural settings, allowing these elements to guide the construction of each piece. In this way, the work evolves alongside my lived experience.”

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Light, Tension, Construction

She prints her images on paper, nylon, lycra, vinyl, and aluminium, then cuts, layers, and stacks them into sculptural compositions. “Through this process, I manipulate perspective to blur the boundaries between reality and construction, shifting between soft and hard surfaces, animate and inanimate forms, the mundane and the whimsical. The work often exists in a liminal space—between image and object, surface and volume—where the photograph becomes something to engage with.”

Lai’s visual language is meticulously crafted, even when it seems fragile. In her series Ongoing Narratives, light serves as a sculptural element. “I combine multiple light sources, such as strobe and continuous light. This lighting emphasises the sculptural form of objects and the body, enhancing their surface textures. In the Rubber, Rubber series, projected images mimic skin tones on synthetic materials, blurring the lines between body and object. This layering creates an interior, slightly surreal world that feels both theatrical and psychological, reflecting a constructed space that can appear disorienting."

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About

Yi Hsuan Lai is a Taiwanese-born, New York-based visual artist whose practice merges photography, sculpture, found objects, and her own body. Lai received her MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in 2020. She will be a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2026) and has held residencies at SoMad (2025), Light Work (2024), and Vermont Studio Centre (2023). Her solo exhibitions include NARS Foundation (2024) and Gallery 456 (2024).

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www.yihsuanlai.com