DALLAS, Texas (November 20, 2024) - The Nasher Sculpture Center announces a major exhibition by Haegue Yang (b. Seoul, 1971). Across the museum’s spaces, the exhibition features newly conceived airy and sprawling installations and a dense arrangement of her previous sculptures. Haegue Yang: Lost Lands and Sunken Fields is curated by Nasher Curator, Dr. Leigh Arnold and will be on view from February 1 to April 27, 2025.
Over the past three decades, Yang has developed a prolific and hybrid body of work that reconciles and juxtaposes folk traditions with the canon of modern and contemporary sculpture-making. Informed by in-depth exploration into vernacular techniques and related customs and rituals, and her continual movement through and within disparate cultures, Yang’s work is both homage to multiple modernities and critique of the singular Western modernist project.
For her exhibition at the Nasher, Yang explores a series of contrasts in response to the building’s architecture: light and dark, aerial and grounded, buoyant and heavy, sparse and dense. Entering the Nasher’s light-filled, street-level galleries, visitors will be greeted by a group of sculptures suspended from the ceiling. On view for the first time, Yang’s Airborne Paper Creatures – Triple Synecology (2025) comprise hanji (Korean mulberry paper), birch plywood, fabric ornaments, and metallic bells. These new works reflect the natural world, referencing the often abstracted forms of fauna such as birds, insects, and aquatic animals in centuries-old kite-making traditions that flourished throughout Asia. As installed in this transitional space of the building—just beyond the entrance and admissions desks and ahead of the threshold to the garden—Airborne Paper Creatures call attention to the felt and heard environment: airflow and the sound of the bells on the kites that is prompted by the continual movement taking place just beneath them.
In the adjacent gallery, Mignon Votives (2025) is situated within a natural environment of river rock and organic material, like moss, that covers the ground and defines a broad, shifting horizontal plane. Miniature sculptures comprised of pinecones and driftwood draped with artificial plants, as well as small cairns with banknotes sandwiched between layers of assembled synthetic stone, emerge from the landscape and signal a new direction in Yang’s sculptural production. Depicted on the banknotes are a wide variety of animals, calling on the long, widespread history of currency featuring majestic creatures to symbolize national heritage and power as a form of heraldry. The artist-fabricated banknotes provide an unexpected addition of color to the otherwise monochromatic ground and populate the space with imagery of elephants, rhinoceroses, lions, and other species of wildlife. Together the stacks of stones—which echo an ancient pan-civilizational act of prayer—and the paper bills represent offerings or wish towers, conflating monetary systems with the natural world, implying an arcane transactional tradition between culture and nature.
In contrast to the spare and floating installations or low-lying sculptural arrangements in the Nasher’s sunlit, street-level spaces, the Lower Level Gallery evokes an entirely different atmosphere. Manifold bodies of work will be brought together to compose a temporary installation titled Cenote Observatory, transforming the dimmed space into an immersive survey of anthropomorphic sculptures. Sonic Sculptures (2013–) comprise objects festooned with metal bells that can be engaged and manipulated as instruments. When activated, the sculptures produce a subtle rattling soundscape, in an allusion to ancient rituals. At the center of the dense installation is Umbra Creatures by Rockhole (2017–18), a seven-part sculptural ensemble either suspended or standing freely on casters, that bridges two series, the Sonic Sculptures and The Intermediates (2015–). Made of artificial straw, The Intermediates evoke weaving crafts practiced by agricultural societies. Umbra Creatures boast voluminous and tentacled bodies replete with bushy, hairy, metallic, and woven surfaces, creating an enigmatic and captivating presence within the gallery. Also included in Cenote Observatory are works from Yang’s series Non-Indépliables, nue (2018), which take the ready-made drying rack as a bare central structure that is adorned with electrical cords, light bulbs, and other objects, such as pill boxes. Backed by wallpaper suggesting an opening to an undefined vista, the densely populated installation transforms the white cube gallery into a cave-like portal to another world that is inhabited by sculptural creatures.
“Haegue Yang’s work continually provides new insights into the multivalent world in which we live, reconciling past and present,” says Nasher Interim Director and Chief Curator Jed Morse. “Floating, jingling, dancing, Yang’s sculptures amaze and leap, as well as highlight the centrality of objects in making meaning from our diverse well of experiences. We are thrilled to share such captivating art with our audiences in Dallas.”
Haegue Yang: Lost Lands and Sunken Fields will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue. With a survey of her sculptural development from her early career through 2025, the publication will become the ultimate resource for Yang’s sculptural production. It will also contain documentation of the Nasher exhibition and essays by Nasher Curator Dr. Leigh Arnold and scholars Yasmil Raymond and Thomas McDonough.
Haegue Yang: Lost Lands and Sunken Fields is made possible by support provided by Howard and Cindy Rachofsky and the Dallas Tourism Public Improvement District (DTPID).
Press Contacts:
Alexxa Gotthardt
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Adrienne Lichliter-Hines
Nasher Sculpture Center
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About Haegue Yang
Haegue Yang was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1971. Since the mid-1990s, Yang has lived and worked in Seoul and Berlin and currently teaches at her alma mater, the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Her immersive multimedia environments combine diverse materials and cultural traditions with references ranging from scientific phenomena and sociopolitical narratives to art history. Her dual or hybrid materiality of a range of industrial objects and intensive, craft-based techniques, leads to unexpected connections between divergent worlds of contemporary mass production, ancient civilizations and natural phenomena.
Yang actively exhibits at the international biennales while her work is represented in prominent institutional and private collections all over the world, including the Guggenheim New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, to name a few. A prolific artist, Yang has been the subject of many solo shows and projects at the aforementioned institutions and others, including the New Museum, New York (2010); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2012); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2018); SMK – National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2022); Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2023); and S.M.A.K., Ghent (2023). The Hayward Gallery, London is currently presenting a survey of Yang’s work over the last three decades.
Her work has also featured in numerous international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2009), dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012), the Taipei Biennial (2014), Sharjah Biennial 12 (2015), Istanbul Biennial (2019) the Biennale of Sydney (2018), the Singapore Biennale (2022), and most recently the Lahore Biennale (2024).