EventsThe New Social Environment#1227
Kang Seung Lee: Body of Memory
Featuring Lee and Amy Kahng
Tuesday, May 13, 2025 4 p.m. Eastern / 1 p.m. Pacific
These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
Artist Kang Seung Lee joins art historian and curator Amy Kahng for a conversation.
In this Talk
Kang Seung Lee

Photo by Dustin Aksland
Kang Seung Lee lives and works in Los Angeles. His practice engages with the legacy of transnational queer histories and their intersection with art history. Through his drawings, embroideries, assemblages, videos, and performances, Lee embodies what he describes as “tangible and direct means of caring for the past.” Confronting historical marginalization, Lee weaves together narratives of affinity and shared experience that resist historical amnesia. Collected materials also serve as markers of history, with organic objects like dried flowers, fossils, and pearls invoking metaphors of desire and trauma. Carrying the resilience of queer genealogy across time and space, Lee's work proposes expansive ways to record, recover, and preserve intergenerational memories for the future.
Amy Kahng

Art historian and independent curator Amy Kahng is a PhD candidate in Art History and Criticism at Stony Brook University and a 2024-25 Tyson Scholar at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. In fall 2025, she will be a Florence Levy Kay Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American and Asian Diasporas Art History at Brandeis University. Her dissertation project examines twentieth century Asian American artists and their relationship to land, colonial vision, and conditional racialization. Other research interests include global contemporary art, modern and contemporary art in Korea, and transnational queer and feminist art practices.
We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨