For the ninth installment of SJMA’s “Beta Space” series, Los Angeles artist Kang Seung Lee (b. 1978) reactivates the life and practice of late Bay Area artist and gardener Ed Aulerich-Sugai (1950–1994). An artistic collaboration across time, the installation includes new work by Seung Lee staged in dialogue with Aulerich-Sugai’s paintings, drawings, and objects.  

Since Aulerich-Sugai’s death from AIDS in 1994, his partner, Daniel Ostrow, has stewarded the late artist’s legacy, transforming his former San Francisco studio and home into a public archive of plants, artworks, and sketchbooks. Seung Lee’s poetic, multidisciplinary practice centers the lives and work of artists lost to AIDS, echoing the practices of care and remembrance surrounding Aulerich-Sugai’s life and death. 

Debuting new drawings and installations by Seung Lee, Beta Space situates Aulerich-Sugai’s work and life amid other artists’ practices, weaving it into an expansive tapestry of queer cultural history. Alongside Seung Lee’s richly layered works—including delicate graphite drawings, gold thread embroideries, and watercolors bearing seeds and pebbles from queer cruising sites the world over—Aulerich-Sugai's seldom-exhibited cloud paintings and botanical illustrations suggest the potential for finding joy in daily practices of observation. The exhibition also includes plants and personal objects from Ostrow and poet and writer Robert “Bob” Glück, friends and former romantic partners of Aulerich-Sugai, who have tended his legacy by preserving his studio, garden, and extensive dream journals.  

During his lifetime, Aulerich-Sugai exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Asian Art Museum, among other institutions, and worked at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers. Beta Space brings his story again to San José to introduce it to a new generation and integrate his legacy into the ever-growing, international network of queer memory and cultural practice that Seung Lee and his collaborators continue to nurture and build. 

Beta Space: Kang Seung Lee and Ed Aulerich-Sugai is part of the inaugural Further Triennial, a major new Northern California initiative that spans the Bay Area and beyond to explore the region’s creative and cultural life. With an emphasis on the untold and the offbeat, Further Triennial exhibitions variously spotlight contemporary artists, explore resonant themes and social issues, and revisit the region’s artistic past through the excavation of lost histories and new perspectives on its iconic artists. 

Support

Beta Space: Kang Seung Lee and Ed Aulerich-Sugai is made possible by the SJMA Exhibitions Fund.

Operations and programs at the San José Museum of Art are made possible by principal support from SJMA’s Board of Trustees, and a Cultural Affairs Grant from the City of San José and the Skyline Foundation; by lead support from the Lipman Family Foundation, the Adobe Foundation, the William Randolph Hearst Foundation, Toby and Barry Fernald, Tad Freese and Brook Hartzell, the Richard A. Karp Charitable Foundation, Tammy and Tom Kiely, Yvonne and Mike Nevens, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Teiger Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the SJMA Director's Council and Council of 100; and with significant endowment support from the William Randolph Hearst Foundation and the San José Museum of Art Endowment Fund established by the Knight Foundation at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.