Rubber, Rubber - Yi Hsuan Lai

SoMad, the femme and queer led art space just south of Madison Square Park, is proud to present a solo exhibition by 2025 artist-in-residence Yi Hsuan Lai. On view October 16 through December 18, this exhibition marks the culmination of Lai’s five-month residency.

Through staged photography and sculptural installation, Yi Hsuan Lai’s Rubber, Rubber investigates the materiality of perception and embodiment. As a foreigner in a new land, Lai works with overlooked objects, sensing in their rawness a potential for renewal and communal belonging. Skin-like rubber forms are projected into space, interwoven with raw materials, found objects, and the artist’s own body. The projections behave like skin—thin, porous, intimate, and protective—while also expanding into shelters, spaces the body can inhabit, simultaneously as subject and architecture. These dynamic assemblages collapse distinctions between photograph and sculpture, surface and volume, creating ephemeral constructions that echo both psychological and corporeal landscapes.

A projection installation, revealed behind a curtain, activates the viewer’s imagination of what layers compose Lai’s photographs. Material tensions and abstracted depictions of the body create a disorienting experience in which boundaries dissolve, identity becomes fluid, and the surreal intimacy of inhabiting another consciousness becomes reality.