Weekend Portfolio: Yi Hsuan Lai
A cactus in the chimney
"A cactus in the chimney" is a series of staged photography, which incorporates the artist’s self-portrait and artificial materials to reflect the contradictory relationship between the urban environment and human nature. The artist uses her body as a receiver and explores psychological emotions felt by people living in the industrial world. She also evokes her personal experience of anxiety and insecurity felt like a foreigner living in New York City. Her scenes are sophisticated constructions built from disposed-of objects and common artificial materials generated by wasteful environments, which transform into playful, uncanny scenarios. The characters in the images are her symbolic avatar, traveling in the interior and exterior world in pictorial space.
Yi Hsuan Lai (b. 1988) is a visual artist from Taiwan currently working in New York. She recently completed her Master of Fine Arts in photography and related video media from the School of Visual Arts. Her graphic design and live theater documentation background led her to develop an artistic process that combines performance, staged self-portraiture, installation, and sculpture-based photography. Lai combines photography and sculpture to create work that speaks to the physical and psychological experiences that reflect the complexity of self-identity and otherness. Lai also experiments with the representation of sensations through physical materials to capture an imagined world. She incorporates costumes and sculptures she makes for her self-portraits and, in turn, her photographs validate the bodily transformation to respond to and reflect the exterior and interior worlds.
To view more of Yi Hsuan Lai’s work, visit her website here and Instagram here
