SoMad’s Artists in Residence: Acts of Service by Keith Lafuente & Rubber Rubber by Yi Hsuan Lai

SoMad, 34 E 23rd Street, 3rd Floor, NY, New York, 10010

SoMad, the femme and queer led art space just south of Madison Square Park, is proud to present two solo exhibitions by 2025 artists-in-residence Keith Lafuente and Yi Hsuan Lai. On view October 16 through December 18, the exhibitions mark the culmination of each artist’s five-month residency. While distinct in medium and form, both projects probe ideas of perception and belonging.

In Acts of Service, Keith Lafuente examines the many connotations of “service” — sexual, military, culinary, religious, and altruistic — through a carnivalesque installation of kinetic and static sculptures. Animated stuffed fabric figures perform exchanges of labor and desire: a go-go boy waiter serves on top of a table, and a sailor pole dances on a pig spit for a voyeuristic audience including tarsiers and turtles. Their automation is a cycle, a structure visible to the audience but not to the characters in their own world.

Lafuente’s work is deeply informed by Filipino hospitality traditions and the global inequities of labor shaped by colonial history. His references to kink culture further complicate notions of what society deems empowering, degrading, or beautiful.

Through staged photography and sculptural installation, Yi Hsuan Lai’s Rubber, Rubber investigates the materiality of perception and embodiment.. As a foreigner in a new land, Lai works with overlooked objects, sensing in their rawness a potential for renewal and communal belonging. Skin-like rubber forms are projected into space, interwoven with raw materials, found objects, and the artist’s own body. The projections behave like skin—thin, porous, intimate, and protective—while also expanding into shelters, spaces the body can inhabit, simultaneously as subject and architecture. These dynamic assemblages collapse distinctions between photograph and sculpture, surface and volume, creating ephemeral constructions that echo both psychological and corporeal landscapes.

A projection installation, revealed behind a curtain, activates the viewer’s imagination of what layers compose Lai’s photographs.  Material tensions and abstracted depictions of the body create a disorienting experience in which boundaries dissolve, identity becomes fluid, and the surreal intimacy of inhabiting another consciousness becomes reality.

SoMad, 34 E 23rd Street, 3rd Floor, NY, New York, 10010

Email inquiries to gallery@somad.nyc