Yi Hsuan Lai

February 2024

Yi Hsuan Lai is a Taiwanese lens-based artist living in New York City. Starting from  her experience as an immigrant and “Other,” she collects discarded and found materials and uses her body to make handmade sculptures and assemblages for staged photographs, both still-lifes and self-portraits. Her artistic process involves construction and deconstruction, with the final presentation hovering between two and three dimensions as a means to examine the complex interplay between physical and psychological landscapes.

Yi Hsuan received an MFA in photography from School of Visual Arts in New York City (2020) and in 2023 she received support from NYFA’s immigrant artist program. In 2023 she also received residency fellowships from the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work was among LensCulture’s Critics’ Top 10 in 2022. Her solo exhibition, Anonymous Town, appeared in SPRING/BREAK Art Show (New York City, 2020). Group exhibitions include Portraits Beyond Faces at the FLOOR Gallery (Korea, 2023), Today is Yesterday’s Tomorrow at the PH Museum Photo Festival (Bologna, 2022), Photo London (UK, 2023), If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now at Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY, 2021), and Smart Objects, Flattened Images at Well Well Project (Portland, OR, 2022).

www.flaneurshan.com/