The Brooklyn Rail

Kang Seung Lee’s Body of Memory uses an array of visual and tactile materials to ask the questions that perhaps all queer art must ask in the purported aftermath of the AIDS crisis: what does it mean to mourn the loss of a body to processes of aging when that body has survived the apex of the plague years? How can one do so without mocking the dead? Can age even be understood as loss, or is such a thought perverse after AIDS?

Individual drawings, hung panels of wood veneer upon which objects both organic (wood, shell) and manmade (drawings, twine, and cloth hangings) are mounted, and a large wooden platform with similar mounted objects in the middle of the floor comprise the installation. Organic materials live and die, they bloom and rot as bodies do. Lee’s use of veneer exemplifies this transience; the wood is marked by burls, signs of the tree’s disease or injury, scars of sorts. Despite its apparent sheen, the veneer’s beauty is not derived from newness but rather from processes of growth and degeneration.

The installation abounds with intertexts and references, none more persistent than Robert Glück’s 2023 book, About Ed, a narrative about his experiences treating the loss of his lover and friend Ed Aulerich-Sugai. Glück’s words feature prominently in a video of Meg Harper, a dancer over eighty years old, on view in an adjacent room. A small, hanging banner is embroidered with a phrase from the book: “Die with the Living, Live with the Dead.” Body of Memory is Lee’s ever-meticulous, care-full (the work of care being essential here) attempt to do as Glück tells him.

Something surprisingly Victorian—in all the best ways—characterizes Lee’s assemblages, even though his orderly aesthetic shares little with typical, chockablock Victorian interiors. There is something of the nineteenth-century scrapbook about his sensibilities or, better yet, the specimen collection. One might think of the three-dimensional wood panels as shadow boxes. One drawing hews closely to a William Morris pattern.

The idea of living with the dead called to my mind a seminal Victorian text, Charles Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864–65). The novel opens with a scene of a man dredging the Thames for things that might be sold, for corpses that might still be burdened with money. Lee is also a mudlark of sorts, gathering his organic materials as he does from parks, cruising spots, the homes of his subjects.

Lee’s work is an assemblage of body parts brought into intimate proximity with the viewer: eyes, nipples, patches of skin whose lesions simultaneously gesture towards the blotches of age and the veritable stigmata of Kaposi sarcoma, so often AIDS-related. Even in the video of Harper, before she dances, a series of close-ups catalogues craggy, hair-ridden, crepe-y, stiff, and shuddery body parts. We see what each part is, or what it has come to be, before we are amazed by what it can do. Fragmentation and disarticulation evoke Dickens’s Mr. Venus, an “articulator of bones,” who collects discarded, amputated, or “found” body parts to create salable skeletons. Lee, too, is a kind of articulator of bones, but he seeks not to make new wholes (would that even be possible?). Rather, he picks up the pieces, takes stock of them, and arranges them, often using ritual materials, into something meaningful, even sacred.

In About Ed, Glück testifies to the difficulties of caring for one’s body: “Sheer awareness of my own life made me tired. Dressing and undressing the body, treating its illnesses, feeding it, cleaning it, overwhelming it with orgasms and so on.” Lee takes on this burden for others and performs his task in a manner that might be thought of as reverent.

In 1991, the literary critic Jeff Nunokawa described how “the gay community is taxed during its sad time by a double burden: the variegated regime of heterosexism not only inhibits the work of acknowledging the loss of a gay man, it also…cast[s] his death as his definition.” That is to say, in a homophobic society, the gay man lives solely to die. But Lee, Nunokawa, Glück, and others survive. What strategies best suit the strange condition of the queer person (and, more specifically, the gay man) who lives?

Nunokawa mentions the NAMES Project out of which came quilts, staggering in their size, each panel memorializing someone lost to AIDS. The gallery’s biography of Lee speaks of his anti-monumental sensibility, and indeed, Lee’s installation takes part in the same gesture of anti-monumental, homespun memorialization (in the case of the AIDS quilts, unfurled in the presence of state-sanctioned monuments), even as he reaches the heights of aesthetic achievement. On a piece of cloth in the central platform in the middle of the room, Lee has stitched “perseverance” in antique gold thread, not so much as an imperative but as a simple statement of fact: we are still here. Body of Memory gestures to a future—one marked by the creaks and creases of unexpected old age—for queer people whose lives have so persistently been imagined to be hurtling towards death.