Kang Seung Lee: Skin

About the exhibition

Skin (2024) is the third in a trio of videos by Kang Seung Lee exploring dance, in which the artist examines the body as “a breathing repository of movement, memory, sensation, where timelines unfurl and personal and collective histories collide.” Accompanied by a pulsating electronic score, Skin consists of a single routine performed by Meg Harper, a dancer, teacher, and choreographer whose affiliation with the groundbreaking Merce Cunningham Dance Company dates to the 1960s. In their dynamic performance, Harper enacts an archive of repeated movements committed to memory over many decades of repeated motion. As Lee suggests, Harper’s body “tells the story of a lifetime through every movement.”

Close-up shots of Harper’s creased and scarred skin emphasize how time is etched into the body. As the routine unfolds, their expressive portrayal of grief and joy suggest that memory is both a mental and physical imprint. This trope is deepened by the presence 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 in 1994. Excerpts from About Ed, including the poignant adage, “die with the living, live with the dead,” emphasize the connection between muscle memory and acts of remembrance.

Kang Seung Lee (b. 1978) was born in Seoul, South Korea and lives and works in Los Angeles. His practice examines themes of identity, community, and collective memory, frequently addressing the legacy of transnational queer histories as they intersect with art history. Committed to the handcrafted and anti-monumental, Lee explains, “My work comes from the desire to challenge the narrow perspective of the biased and first-world-oriented timeline of history, and it speaks about the potential to intervene in ordered systems as manifested in the form of visual marks, traces, and indexes.”

His work was featured in the 2024 edition of the Venice Biennale and is held in numerous public collections including the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA), the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, CA), the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Kadist Foundation (San Francisco, CA and Paris, France), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, (Providence, RI), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY), among others.