Moments of Muscle Memory
Kang Seung Lee is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice examines erasure and invisibility, intergenerational community, and collective memory. Born in Seoul, South Korea, now living and working in Los Angeles, Lee gathers stories and organic materials from locations across continents, weaving communal counter-narratives of historical events such as the AIDS epidemic and traditional art forms such as ballet.
In the weeks leading up to his solo exhibition, Body of Memory, on view at Alexander Gray Associates, I had the chance to speak with Lee regarding his research-based process and relationship to his subjects and collaborators. We sat down to discuss embodied memory, the silence of the archives, and the relationship between queer histories and ecology.
Kang Seung Lee, Untitled (Skin, Constellation 5), 2024. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York.
Emma Fiona Jones: I’m intrigued by the role of organic materials in your work. I was really struck by your project collecting seeds, plants, and soil from cruising grounds such as Elysian Park and Fort Road Beach, this really elegant way of gesturing to transnational queer communities. What is the significance of sourcing and integrating organic materials, and how do you see the relationship between the natural and artificial in your work?
Kang Seung Lee: A lot of times, organic materials that I bring into my work are site-specific. They are often intentionally mentioned through captions or text, ensuring an entryway for the viewer. A lot of times, they are sourced from sites of queer memory, where I believe memories live on through non-human objects or organic materials. Elysian Park [in Los Angeles] is one of them—it’s a very well-known cruising ground of the past, but also the present. It’s an ongoing cruising ground for certain demographics.
I’m interested in histories that have not been written or been excluded from mainstream history. We often think of it as human failure that we weren’t able to write these histories—particularly relating to certain periods of queer history, like the AIDS epidemic. I’m looking at organic materials as witnesses to these historical events.
I’m also really interested in seeds and dried plants, in that they are constantly in the process of transformation or regeneration throughout the process of seeding and decaying, yet they come back the following year in different forms. They are not necessarily the same plants, but they are a different generation—there’s this genealogy that can be addressed through that process.
EFJ: Your work is heavily research-based and intertwined with the archives and the process of archiving; at the same time, it addresses the fact that we as queer people/artists have been written out of history. Can you walk me through your research process?
KSL: I’m interested in personal memories and individual histories that are not valued in the traditional process of what we call the archive. We have this criteria of selecting certain historical moments and figures, and then they become monumental in mainstream history writing. I think in some ways, that is necessary, but also we lose a lot in the process. That is more obvious in the queer community, which has been excluded from mainstream history writing for a very long time. And because of that, when you are trying to find a genealogy of yourself as a queer person, you have to navigate in a weird way, and also be speculative at times. I felt that very much when I was growing up in Korea and didn’t have access to any queer people of former generations. I think it goes back to that as well as my desire to be connected to some sort of history.
A lot of times, people who become subjects of my art come from my own personal relationships—friends or friends of friends—so it’s directly coming from my own queer community. Because I myself am living a life of what I call transnational[ity]—I go back and forth between different countries, and I have lived in different places—I have this interest in creating histories that go beyond borders or cultural barriers.
There is often more than one person in my projects, and oftentimes they are from different places, and perhaps different generations. I feel that their stories are very much connected, through different threads of stories in queer communities, and I’m trying to address that—how we are all really connected through experiences of being queer, how our stories are intertwined. I also consider the influence of these stories: through the next generations, our stories will be connected. There are those whom I don’t know yet, but I believe that through someone’s storytelling, somehow our stories will meet, and then we will be connected.
Kang Seung Lee, Skin (still), 2024. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York.
EFJ: I’m struck by the focus on dancers and dancers’ bodies in connection with queerness in your work. Something you said in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar regarding your video works involving dancers stuck with me: “I want to continue the talk about dancers that had a queer body at their core.” Can you talk about Skin, the video work in your upcoming show, and what draws you to dancers as a subject?
KSL: I’ve always been interested in dancers and dancers’ bodies, but it really came from this series of videos I’ve been making for the past few years in relation to this Singaporean-Chinese choreographer and dancer, Goh Choo San. That’s when I actually dove into dance history, and also how queer histories are connected to that in many ways. In the process of that and from working with these dancers, I learned so much about dancers’ bodies. I learned that almost all of them deal with injuries, and they remember exactly where they had injuries. Everything is ingrained in their body.
Dancers are also dealing with the process of aging. Particularly, in traditional dance, like ballet, in order to perform what is standard, you not only need to have a specific type of body, but a younger body as well. So I got really interested in the aging process with regard to queer dancers’ bodies and how the body can contain personal and collective memories in a very abstract, but in some ways, also very direct, form. They remember how their body felt at certain moments—through injury, through aging—and their decades of movements become muscle memory. Without even thinking, their body just moves in certain ways because of those muscle memories, and I saw that as a metaphor for embodied memories in the queer community.
So for this new project, Skin, I started to work with Meg Harper, who just turned 81. She danced for many prominent queer choreographers, like Merce Cunningham, Robert Wilson, and many others. She also was very active in her own queer community in New York City and lost a lot of people to the AIDS epidemic. So her own embodied experiences manifest all of these personal and collective memories.
Skin became very apparent to me. I had already created work about skin and tattoos by scanning my friends’ skin in a previous project, looking at tattoos and scanned skin as sort of witnesses to history and personal memory. Aging skin is even more interesting to me, because from some perspectives, skin is collective, not individual. There are microorganisms living on our skin, so there are many other beings—bacteria and whatnot—that are living with us. At the same time, skin is something that speaks to the aging process. But skin is being replaced every 100 days. We have completely new skin cells, yet our skin still ages. So I got really interested in this process: looking at skin and scars as a subsect of this new project.
EFJ: The entire video, Skin, is very beautiful, but there are parts of it that are simply funny. How do you see humor playing a role in your work?
KSL: I try to talk about humor in my work in my own way. A lot of people think of my work as very serious—dark and sad and all of that. But humor has always been a power, particularly for queer people. Working with Meg, I really wanted to show how pain and pleasure are different sides of a coin. Pleasure always comes with pain, and to cope with pain, we bring pleasure and joy into our life. The queer community has always been like that. Particularly, how the dance floor has always been so important as a communal space, because the reality of our lives is a lot of struggle, but there’s this space of moving your bodies and dancing together and creating this safe space that we call queer life and queer nightlife. So I wanted to bring in humor in a way that speaks to that space.
I also said to Meg several times: Don't think about your professional career or your life as a dancer or choreographer. Think about your life as a queer person: the joy, all of the nightclubs you went to, and how important that also was in your life. Because there’s so much joy.
Kang Seung Lee, Skin (still), 2024. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York.
EFJ: I’m curious about the role of embroidery in your practice.
KSL: Perhaps two things: One is the pleasure of doing it, which comes with pain as well. Repetitive craft practice comes with physical pain, but there’s something extremely satisfying in it as well. We talked about pleasure and pain as two sides of the same coin. There’s always this relationship between the pain in the process of doing embroidery—and a lot of labor—but also there’s so much joy that is very visible when you finish it. So there is this very simple form of joy that comes with it.
And conceptually, of course, I consider what it means to embroider, and how embroidery is placed in the history of conceptual art as a practice. But embroidery also became an embodied practice for me. Because it takes so much time and creates space for thinking, and because you’re doing something very repetitive, embroidery is a medium that provides that mental space to really think about the stories that I’m reading and looking at. I think a lot about the stories and histories in someone’s artwork and archives, and what might be the best way to embody their stories. So I think it has provided that space of physical embodiment as well as this conceptual space to think about how I’m connected to stories and archives, and artwork made by someone who I didn’t know, yet I feel very close and connected to.
EFJ: The art world can be very individualistic and isolating, yet your work has a lot to do with intergenerational bonds and communal care work. What role does collaboration or collectivity play in your practice?
KSL: I think about care a lot. And I think it’s also because I’m aging, myself, and am no longer considered young. Within the queer community, many of the relationships are not through biological connections, but through community. We’re not biologically connected, yet there are always these intergenerational relationships being created through conversations and sharing experiences. There’s such power in this care coming from your own community of queer people, and I want to touch upon that care and the intergenerational relationships that form through it. The reason I have access to these archives and personal materials is because there were people who really cared for the memories of these people who are no longer with us. There’s so much invisible labor for a story to come out and to be shared.
My realization of that care and sharing became really apparent and important for me, and I wanted to participate in it. My projects are obviously art projects, but through the research process and through this collaboration, we share these moments, and relationships are created. I try to look at it as part of my life, not just as my art career or art projects, but me as a person. These relationships are created through the shared experience of creating art together, but it also becomes my real life story, and I continue these relationships in my daily life. I become friends with these people, with the caretakers of estates or archives, and that is really important to me as an artist and a person.
EFJ: Invisibility and erasure has always been a double-edged sword for the queer community—an act of violence and oppression when coming from the outside, but used among ourselves as a means of protection and collective survival. Your work holds this tension beautifully. How do you grapple with that contradiction?
KSL: That’s a very insightful question, and also very difficult. It’s been my strategy to use erasure to talk about erasure and use absence to talk about presence. There’s always more than one thing [that my work is doing].
There’s a series of drawings that I have been doing where all human figures are erased or blurred, so viewers do not see the figure in the picture. Almost all of those images reference historical images: either art made by queer artists of former generations or interesting images that I’m bringing in. So on the surface level, I’m talking about the erasure of queer bodies or historical figures that came before me, but when we actually see the physical erasure of these figures, we also immediately think about the presence of that person. It’s sort of like when we lose someone who’s very close to us, we feel the void of that person, but that also means we feel their presence in our life. Their memories are living with us, and it allows for the possibility of talking about the person’s life. Erasure and presence always come together in my work, and I’m hoping that this contradiction plays together and creates possibilities of talking about them, and we can make the future different in some way.
Kang Seung Lee, Untitled (Skin, Constellation 7), 2024. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York.
Kang Sung Lee: Body of Memory if on view at Alexander Gray Associates from April 26 through May 31, 2025.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
