Beta Space: Kang Seung Lee & Ed Aulerich-Sugai
San José Museum of Art
March 12, 2027 – Fall 2027
Ed Aulerich-Sugai, Clouds #1, 1973. Oil on canvas, 69 x 39 inches.
Ed Aulerich-Sugai’s work will be featured in a major exhibition at the San José Museum of Art in Spring 2027. Beta Space: Kang Seung Lee and Ed Aulerich-Sugai, curated by Juan Omar, is a two-person exhibition and posthumous collaboration that places Aulerich-Sugai’s paintings, drawings, and objects in dialogue with new work by Los Angeles artist Kang Seung Lee (b. 1978).
Lee’s work often returns to the lives and legacies of queer artists lost to AIDS, using drawing, embroidery, installation, and archival research to create acts of remembrance across time. In this exhibition, Lee’s new work responds directly to Aulerich-Sugai’s art, archive, garden, and circle of care.
“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.”
– From Exhibition Text, San José Museum of Art
The exhibition is part of the Further Triennial, a major Northern California initiative spanning the Bay Area and beyond that explores the region’s creative and cultural life.
More information will be made available as the exhibition approaches.