03/16/2026
In a series of graphite drawings — one of which is presented in the exhibition “Modes of Persistence” — Kang Seung Lee references Alvin Baltrop’s photographic series The Piers, 1975–1986. The abandoned Hudson River piers along Manhattan’s West Side became an important gathering place for q***r communities in the 1970s and 1980s, after the collapse of the elevated West Side Highway in 1973 left large sections of the waterfront derelict and largely cut off from the rest of the city. Within these decaying industrial structures, a complex social world emerged, inhabited by q***r, trans, and often homeless individuals who appropriated the ruins as a site of intimacy, freedom, and survival.
Baltrop spent more than a decade documenting life in these spaces, creating one of the most significant visual archives of q***r life in New York before the AIDS crisis. The piers were also a site of artistic experimentation, most famously Gordon Matta-Clark’s Day’s End (1975), a monumental “building cut” made in Pier 52. Lee’s drawings revisit this historically charged landscape. The images depict the architectural remnants of the piers emptied of their communities, pointing to the ways q***r bodies and histories are frequently erased from official narratives and historical documentation.
Kang Seung Lee, Untitled (The Piers, 1975-1986, Alvin Baltrop 4), 2025
Graphite on paper, wood frame
13 x 20 cm | 5.25 x 8 in
Framed: 42 x 42 x 4 cm | 16.5 x 16.5 x 1.5 in
