By Travis Diehl, November 10 2025
The photos in this exhibition through December 18 star a slab of putty-colored rubber that Yi Hsuan Lai found lying around during her five-month residency at SoMad. Its kinked and rolled form features in every photograph at least once. There’s a vinyl print of the rubber curled up on a seamless white background, stuck above the doorway. From there, it gets more complicated: the artist built elaborate studio shots using prints of the rubber photos clipped to C-stands, projections of the rubber pics, and sometimes the rubber itself, among silvery materials and props. Often, glimpses of the artist’s skin come through the jumbled tableaus.
It’s tempting to call these portraits, although the artist is barely visible. The thorough play with layers, photos of photos of objects and so on, feels performative. The sets resemble costumes, not just because they’re dazzling and fanciful: one image, “Within You and Me” (2025) features a ladder made of mirrors and a purple sash of tulle, and another entitled “Residual Glitter” (2025) a spot lit cage draped with tinsel. They also literally mask the artist’s body, and in an ad-hoc way that likely looks best from a certain distance—namely, the remove of the camera. The photograph is a costume and making the photograph is a performance.
The second half of the gallery, separated from the first by a beige curtain with a low opening, is downright theatrical. The first half demonstrates the concept, while the second gives a sense of process. There’s the rubber again, projected onto a wooden wedge and against the wall, like a set waiting for a performer or anticipating a photographer. But this is backstage. Two smaller photographs—“Pop, Poof, Pulse” (2025)-- hung in this darkened space show the artist wearing black stockings stuffed with water balloons. In one, she lay on the floor with her legs against the wall surrounded by more breast-like water balloons and raked with light, and this photo is hung near the floor among a patch of these balloons and similar hard lighting. The scene compounds the sense of layering, with the burlesque staginess of a dropped string of pearls.
Another sculpture in the back room consists of dozens of long white balloons knotted every few inches and densely hung in a mylar-lined cabinet. The effect is like pale sausage links or watery condoms stuffing a butcher’s window dressed by Warhol. The glittering cabinet draws you in, but the balloons are hard to watch. Unavoidably, rubber is slang for condom. The title “Rubber Rubber” becomes a verbal noun: one who rubs rubber. Or, one who rubs one who rubs. Finally, the rubber itself takes on the sense of a mask, something that conceals the “true identity” of the actor but also draws out another, perhaps buried aspect of them—protects them, so that they can act.
These readings are partially shaped by the setting, a veteran femme and queer space, and by a show on the second-floor presenting interviews with drag queens who’ve performed there. Their voices filter through the floor into Lai’s installation. It used to be that photography saw through a person to their soul, or else revealed a person’s inner nature by capturing the drama on their surface. In Lai’s show, instead, photography offers extra layers—a rubbery prosthesis—that, like a drag persona, allows an inner character to come alive. She uses photography to structure an embodied experience. Is this, in some reflexive way, what the medium can offer in an age of slop? Why wear a costume and step on stage when AI can simulate that for you? Ironically, trad photography’s relative tactility makes it a more human kind of image. This isn’t new territory for the medium. But lots of old things are worth doing.
Travis Diehl is a critic, writer and editor and is a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and the Rabkin Prize in Visual Arts Journalism.
YI HSUAN LAI "Residual Glitter" 2025.
YI HSUAN LAI "Reversed Confrontational" 2025.
YI HSUAN LAI "Within You and Me" 2025.
YI HSUAN LAI Installation view, SoMad Gallery 2025.
YI HSUAN LAI, Installation view, Somad Gallery 2025.