All text and Images by Yi Hsuan Lai

Corporeal Signal

Corporeal Signal is a series of staged photographs presenting handmade sculptures situated between constructed and domestic spaces to represent people’s physical and psychological experiences in the world. I use Sculpey clay to imitate flesh and human skin and then further create the sculptures that take the shape of ambiguous and grotesque forms. The sculptures as emotional objects which embody and externalize my vulnerable self, which triggered from the human emotion and were conceptually inspired by the representation, transformation, and extension of the human body. The form of the clay reflects a sense of uncertainty and fluidity to represent my psychological and physical states as a female identity and as Other.

The sculpture as altered body gets immersed in my body, objects, and space in the photograph, creating the visceral and tangible viewing experience. Sculptures with prosthetic function to incorporate the fictional and real body into the bizarre configuration as a metaphor to assist the hidden emotional disability. The alternate representation of the body reverses insecurity into the imaginary growth. Photography witnesses this transformation.

Seven hands playground, 2020 © Yi Hsuan Lai

I explore the haptic sensibility through the unspecific nature of the objects depicted, whose unusual shapes and scale to offer the audience an uncanny and whimsical viewing experience.

I extended your soul, 2020 © Yi Hsuan Lai

The series creates the organic association between reality and fictionality and engages the thin line between psychology and physicality. These scenarios recall the psychological reactions that speak to the intimacy, vulnerability, sensuality, and sexualism of the human body and empathetic encounter with others, making works that are at once animate and inanimate, self and other, image and thing.