Kang Seung Lee: Body of Memory

Alexander Gray Associates presents Kang Seung Lee: Body of Memory, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the Gallery, featuring recent drawing, embroidery, assemblage, and video works honoring the expression and activism of his artistic predecessors. Acts of remembrance are central to Lee’s process as he explores how transnational queer histories may be recovered and preserved for the future—a deeply personal endeavor for an artist who came of age in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. 

In Body of Memory, Lee explores the aging queer body as a living archive, presenting human skin as a personal and political register that transforms over time. Anatomical imagery appears throughout the works on view, in which Lee combines artistic mediums and organic materials to forge intricate tableaux of queer networks. Close-cropped images of the body—eyes and nipples, wrinkles and topical rashes—join Lee's image bank of botanical illustrations, archival ephemera, photographs, and drawings and embroideries of pre-existing artworks.

Lee often erases the identity of deceased individuals in these appropriated images, inviting the viewer “to reimagine invisibility as potentiality.” This elegiac quality in his work is amplified by the artist’s reliance on materials connoting ritual and ceremony, such as handmade lacquered mulberry paper, antique gold-coated silk thread, and sambe—a traditional Korean hemp textile used in funerary rites.

Lee’s visual language extends to three-dimensional works, including wall-hanging compositions that unify multiple references within a single frame and expansive installations featuring layers of carefully arranged objects that spread out across horizontal surfaces. As the artist describes, there is a “constellation in each work that holds intergenerational memories and the resilience of queer genealogy carried across time and space.” In these assemblages, materials are also markers of history. A wide range of organic objects convey these stories—dried flowers, driftwood, tree bark, and seeds are sourced from a range of queer spaces, from cruising sites in public parks to the homes of Lee’s subjects. Meanwhile, stones, fossils, coral, and sea glass invoke geological deep time—a reference to cycles of death and rebirth.

The largest work on view is an installation that spans across a low-lying plinth, with elements hanging from the ceiling. It consolidates multiple vignettes of watercolors and graphite drawings on parchment, drawing from Lee’s repertoire of found and gathered objects to honor a range of artists including Feliciano Centurión, Hudinilson Jr., Martin Wong, and Tamotsu Yatō. 

Lee's wall-hanging assemblages are equally complex. Their wood veneer backgrounds have distinctive patterns resulting from burls—growths on a tree caused by injury or disease. On these surfaces, Lee’s drawings are paired with luminous pearls and mother-of-pearl shells, expanding his metaphors of desire and trauma. For Lee, these images and objects impart resilience, signifying the delicate balance between fragility and strength.

Tenacity is also a key theme of the video Skin (2024), which presents a dynamic performance by Meg Harper, a dancer whose affiliation with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company dates to the 1960s. Close-ups of Harper’s creased and scarred skin highlight how time is etched onto the body. The suggestion that memory is both a mental and physical imprint is further emphasized by the appearance of emotive passages from Robert Glück’s book About Ed (2023), which recounts his partnership and friendship with the artist Ed Aulerich-Sugai during Ed’s physical decline and death from AIDS-related illness.

Body of Memory underscores Lee’s resistance to historical amnesia, with his works standing as tangible and direct means of caring for the past. How that process plays out in the flesh is telling for Lee, who considers the body “a breathing repository of movement, memory, sensation, where timelines unfurl and personal and collective histories collide.”

Lee’s work has been the subject of numerous solo presentations, including Sala de Vídeo: Kang Seung Lee, MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo), Brazil (2024); Who will care for our caretakers, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Seoul, South Korea (2023); The Heart of A Hand, Vincent Price Art Museum, East Los Angeles College, Monterey Park, CA (2023); Briefly Gorgeous, Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, South Korea (2021); Permanent Visitor, Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Becoming Atmosphere, 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA (2020); and untitled (la revolución es la solución!), Artpace, San Antonio, TX (2017), among others. Lee has participated in many group exhibitions, including Foreigners Everywhere, 60th Venice Biennale, Italy (2024); Out of the Night of Norms (Out of the Enormous Ennui), Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2023); We Cry Poetry, de Appel, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2023); documenta fifteen, Kassel, Germany (2022); Soft Water, Hard Stone, New Museum Triennial, New York, NY (2021); Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning, 13th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2021), among others. Lee's work is in the collections of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, CA; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo), Brazil; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and Sunpride Foundation, Hong Kong, among others. He is the recipient of many grants and awards including the Artadia Award (2023); MacDowell Fellowship (2022); apexart New York International Open Call (2019); and Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant (2018), among others. In 2023, he was a finalist for the Korea Artist Prize. Kang Seung Lee is also represented by Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles and Mexico City, and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul.