ABSENCE TO PRESENCE

Los Angeles, April 2025

Through his organic and human-centric works, KANG SEUNG LEE builds tributes to queer artists whose lives were cut too short by the AIDS epidemic. Building transnational connections between creatives from across the world, the South Korean artist links them through the prism of their shared activism.

With his latest exhibition Body of Memory, opening on the 26th of April at Alexander Gray Associates in New York, Lee looks at the subject of the ageing body as a vessel of memory about the queer figures. Collaborating with Meg Harper – a dancer who was an intrinsic part of the queer community of the 1980s and 1990s – on an exhibited film work entitled Skin, the artist showcases Harper in an unchoreographed dance, with collective memory running through her movement, wrinkles and scars.

The video is accompanied by a series of assemblage constellations, featuring a mix of organic materials, drawings and archival photographs. Using the seeming anonymity through displaying detailed close-ups of his subjects’ bodies, Lee highlights their absence in public awareness, in turn, aiming to end that very erasure and celebrate their legacy.

I wanted to start by talking about the aspect of your work that I find particularly touching. Throughout your practice, you create homages to queer artists that lost their lives to the AIDS epidemic. What does their work mean to you?

Usually, each of my projects have central figures to them – in the past, I have made works about artists like Tseng Kwong Chi, the Chinese New York-based photographer, Goh Choo San, who was a Singaporean choreographer, painter Martin Wong, José Leonilson, this very important conceptual artist that was based in Brazil, or Joon-soo Oh, the Korean writer and activist. All of these artists died in different parts of the world, either in the eighties or nineties. And one of the things that I wanted to talk about with my work is the erased history, particularly related to the queer community and the AIDS epidemic – making tributes to these people, their life, work, and activism.

Also, my aim is to build these transnational connections among them. We tend to talk about their lives separately, in relation to the place they lived in or where they were originally from. But in reality, their stories are very much connected. Although they did not know each other in their lifetime, they are connected through their activism. Throughout the process, I got really interested in how memories are lived through people who were close to them, and through the ageing body. Our body is in transformation all the time through the process of ageing, and ultimately, we all die. And so, for the past few years, I’ve been drawn to looking at the skin, scars, and the process of ageing as part of the transformation.

This focal point is particularly visible with your video work Skin, on which you collaborated with dancer and choreographer Meg Harper. How did you two meet?

Before meeting Meg, I already had an idea about wanting to work with a retired dancer who was very active in the queer community, and who no longer performed professionally, but still was involved with dance in different ways. I was introduced to Meg through people in my own part of the queer community. She was someone who was not afraid of talking about her ageing body. You know, many dancers who are in their seventies or eighties, who no longer perform, are not really comfortable with exposing their bodies at this stage. I think it takes a lot of courage to do that and feel comfortable.

Meg worked with Merce Cunningham for decades, both as a dancer and as a teacher at his dance company, and then also worked with Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs, these very important choreographers from the scene. She’s a witness to a lot of queer histories, and she also lost a lot of friends during the AIDS epidemic. And so there are both these personal and collective memories that live through her body.

*Right Untitled (Skin, Constellation 7), 2024,* graphite, watercolor, acrylic, paper, mother of pearl, mother of pearl buttons, goatskin parchment, antique 24K gold thread, sambe, dried fish scale, wild olive burl, drift wood, ebony bark, pebble, pearls, silver wire, straw braid, bookbinding cord, redwood burl veneer mounted on Dibond, mahogany frame

What was the process like when it came to this collaboration?

We actually built a friendship before working together. I got to learn about her life and all of her experiences, and then we developed this work together. She flew to LA and we made the film.

*Untitled (Skin, Constellation 5), 2024,* graphite, watercolor, acrylic, paper, goatskin parchment, mother of pearl buttons, antique 24K gold thread, sambe, fern fossil from Carboniferous period, wild olive burl, maple burl, acasia thorn, straw braid, drift wood, bookbinding cord, dried seeds, dried palm leaf, piercing needle, pebble, pearls, silver wire, ash olive burl veneer mounted on Dibond, walnut frame

I think that’s very important because you can see how comfortable she feels in front of your lens, which makes the work that much more powerful. In your assemblage works, you tend to erase the identifying features of your subjects. Why do you find that to be a powerful tool?

For me, absence or erasure brings this great potential to talk about the presence of someone. And that’s how I feel about so many artists who died during the AIDS epidemic. Ultimately, we talk about their absence in order to talk about the presence of their legacy or the influence that their work had.

I’m trying to talk about those who are not remembered, and in the process of that, I’m also excluding a lot of personal histories of the people we do not know at all. I think what my work is suggesting is that we can enter this conversation through images that sometimes you might recognize (because you know the reference); my hope is to bring the audience to the place of this very unknown – showing that we have to keep talking about these people who are not remembered and their stories are not told.

*Left Untitled (Darrel Ellis making slides of his work at his apartment in Greenpoint, Allen Frame, c. 1988)*, 2024, graphite on paper

In your assemblage constellations, you use a lot of organic materials — from tree bark or plants to stones or fossils. What is the significance of these objects? How do they reflect on the queer genealogies that you’re highlighting?

I started to use organic materials around 2016 or 2017 when I did my initial research at the garden of Derek Jarman, surrounding his home called Prospect Cottage. That’s where Jarman moved in the late eighties when he was diagnosed as HIV-positive. He lived there with his partner, Keith Collins, who looked after the garden for the 25 years following Jarman’s death in 1994.

During my visits, I started to think about how each of the plants there comes back into bloom. And a lot of them are coming from the same roots that were put there by Jarman and Collins. That’s when I started to look at plants or non-human objects like stones as these witnesses to the history and these queer genealogies. When we want to tell their stories, we sometimes feel like we’re not able to do it properly, but when the conditions are right, there’s always this potential of blooming and talking about their lives.

Also, I feel like using these materials gave me an opportunity to look at queer history as part of much larger scope of human history. When we look at human history, we tend to look at the different histories of different communities. We also tend to talk about this one cycle of life – we want to see changes in our lifetime. But sometimes, I think it’s important to have a perspective from a much larger timescale because change takes time. And even though we might not actually see the real change that we want in our lifetime, it could happen in the next generation, or the one after that.

Body of Memory by Kang Seung Lee is on view at Alexander Gray Associates in New York from April 26 to May 31, 2025.

*Body of Memory installation view at Alexander Gray Associates, New York*

*Right, Untitled (Hudinilson Jr. Xerox action 1979/1980), 2024,* graphite on lacquered mulberry paper

*Left Kang Seung Lee: Body of Memory, Alexander Gray Associates, New York, 2025*
*Right Skin, 2024, Single-channel 4k video with color and sound, 7 minutes, 45 seconds, Edition of 5 plus 2 AP, Body of Memory installation view at Alexander Gray Associates, New York*

Interview by Martin Onufrowicz

Portrait and studio pictures by Dustin Aksland

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