“Rubber, Rubber”: A Surrealist Fever Dream
Installation view of Yi Hsuan Lai: Rubber, Rubber, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist and SoMad
At SoMad, Yi Hsuan Lai’s solo exhibition, Rubber, Rubber is born out of the culmination of the artist’s residency at the femme and queer-led space located south of Madison Square Park. In the exhibition, the many dimensions of the self are laid bare through a surrealist fever dream of the physical, the intangible, and the tender intersections carved from the crevices they deftly mold.
Yi Hsuan Lai, Echo, 2025. Dye sublimation print on aluminum, 42.5 x 56.75 inches. Image courtesy of the artist
A Taiwanese-born, New York-based artist, Lai stages photographic images by thoughtfully constructing sculptural assemblages from found objects to evoke a sensorial experience that explores the psyche, the physical, and the intensity and dynamism that humans possess. Holding an MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York, the artist expands the peripheries of the intimate and the uncanny through sensorial works that triangulate installation, photography, and sculpture. Immersive and stunning, the skin-like vessels simulate elements of the body both inward and externally.
Installation view of Yi Hsuan Lai: Rubber, Rubber, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist and SoMad
Delicate yet durable, the materiality reflects both the fragility and resilience of our physical forms and the cycles they go through. Lai’s carefully constructed forms reflect our innermost vulnerabilities and evoke our deepest desires and fears in a delectable journey through the numerous depictions of the body. These dimensions seemingly delve into reference books and medical journals, fantasy experimentation, bondage, and cavernous recesses fused with clinical laboratory studies. These disparate threads are spun tenuously to create a web of intrigue and a richly developed installation. Upon exiting the elevator at SoMad, one is immediately confronted by works such as Echo (2025), which is a striking image that feels as though a surgical procedure is underway. This initial encounter brings viewers in contact with nearly human-scale photographs of sculptural and figurative elements in their construction. The tubing and metal apparatus feel obstructive, invasive, and a bit gynecological. The presence of a power imbalance is inherent to this encounter, and a suspenseful chill lingers.
Moving through the outer gallery, one begins to identify relationships between the three-dimensional works and how they are translated or manifested through the language of images. One of Lai’s strengths is her ability to transform material we easily identify into something that seems alien and surreal. Rubber and tubing are twisted, stretched, and melded with the body and its environment through a multi-phase translation from physical objects into indescribable shapes that are then captured in print. Through this manipulation of materials and forms, she has made the photographic sculptural and the object the mirror image. This rigorous back-and-forth is a compelling methodology to bring us into a new world constructed by the artist, challenging one’s sense of reality and proposing terrains of unfamiliarity and discomfort. In an ever-changing climate of increased instability, it is imperative to consider bodily autonomy and how limitations on how one identifies can negatively affect people in countless circumstances. It also serves a reminder to show care and solidarity in this dangerous and precarious era.
Installation view of Yi Hsuan Lai: Rubber, Rubber, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist and SoMad
The fictive, the scientific, and the defiant are distilled in a dance that leads viewers back to a conundrum. In a backroom lit by the glow of projection, the viewer is invited to enter a frame of mind that puts one in direct contact with the works intimately. Residual Glitter (2025) depicts a figure trapped within the environment, a glittery, morning-after intervention that underscores the conceptual framework in a visceral way. Shiny beads and tinsel lend a sparkle that feels haunting and almost arresting, in relation to the bodily forms they frame. Remnants of a party become a reminder of disappointment, loneliness, and vulnerability. This constructed environment is an opportunity to reflect on how one moves through the world, the results of one’s actions, and how they may impact others. Sensitivity emanates from the enigmatic works, encouraging the viewer to think of their own relationships to bodily subjectivity, exposure, exploitation, violence, and performative gestures. For some of us, there is an additional lens in which the works implicate exoticism, sexualization, and stereotypical proscriptions that can impact daily existence and self worth when moving through the world.
Installation view of Yi Hsuan Lai: Rubber, Rubber, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist and SoMad
The twisting of flesh and composites between foam, rubber, and skin conjure the relationships to prosthetics and flesh-tone attributes of the body. They evoke tools or technologies such as undergarments, hosiery, and makeup—all items that were created to render the figure ideal and idealistic. In this work, the artist wrestles with these constructs and dimensions, inserting herself into the equations and exerting her energy in the gymnastics that go with transcribing this territory.
Installation view of Yi Hsuan Lai: Rubber, Rubber, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist and SoMad
To reckon with something so looming that overlaps with so many aspects across the multilayered expanses of gender, sexuality, identity, patriarchal constructions, colonialism, and spirituality is a lifelong pursuit and a continuation of a wider discussion that, like Lai’s work, shapeshifts as it moves through the times and locations across human activity.
Installation view of Yi Hsuan Lai: Rubber, Rubber, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist and SoMad
Rubber, Rubber is a fascinating exploration of the human, the humane, and the internal and external struggles within the vessels one carries oneself in, as they become pressurized within the societies they inhabit. Through this much-needed, meticulous, and poetic exhibition at SoMad, visitors are granted the grace to collectively exhale and embrace, in all of our forms.
Rubber, Rubber is on view at SoMad, 34 E 23rd Street, from October 18th to December 18th, 2025.
