It is difficult to describe Haegue Yang’s artwork succinctly. Her oeuvre is prolific, materially and conceptually diverse. She has created artworks in two and three dimensions, employing materials as various as Venetian blinds, spices, vegetables, video, cloned voices, origami, texts, photography, drying racks, yarn, wallpaper, borrowed furniture, fans, bells, security envelopes, and hanji paper. Further still, she has incorporated sound, heat, wind, and smell into her sculptures and installations to produce atmospheric effects. As Yang weaves together diverse referents, materials, and experiences, she is able to draw out a tension between the handmade and mass-produced, the domestic and the monumental, the historic and the subjective, the haptic and the mystic, ultimately eliciting simultaneous collisions and integrations of divergent modernist, folk, vernacular, and craft traditions.
Throughout 20th-century art and art history, tradition has often been discursively and disparagingly associated with the opposite of modernism. Within this framework, the modern resided within the colonial and imperial capitals of Europe and the United States, whereas the traditional was often relegated to the colonized, indigenous, or so-called “non-Western” world. Yang’s inversions of these disparate traditions upend the lingering residue of colonial structures and suggest new forms of relationality and being in the world.
Yang persistently engages craft techniques as an alternative to industrial production. She has prolifically knit intricate, decorative “cosies” (fig. 1) that disguise and protect the canned foods inside; folded hundreds of origami shapes that occupy installations, are then photographed, and are silhouetted by black spray paint, remaining only as traces (fig. 2); learned macramé during a residency at the Glasgow Sculpture Studios (fig. 3); and studied traditional Korean straw-weaving techniques to construct abstracted totem-like sculptures on casters (fig. 4). In Yang’s artworks, craft techniques bring together the domestic and the industrial, the vernacular and the modern, the handmade and mass produced, the self-taught and the formally trained. They become representative of alternative systems of production that challenge (art) world hierarchies and open up to spaces beyond the institution.
Confounding the separation between domestic and gallery space, Sallim (2009) (fig. 5) re-creates Yang’s Berlin kitchen of that time as a life-sized, steel-framed structure set on casters. The scale model at once abstracts the banal domestic space and dematerializes it. In place of the typical furnishings, appliances, and home goods, she hangs lights, a fan, heat pad, scent emitters, extension cords, and Venetian blinds that only obliquely reference the outfitting of the original room. Only the artwork’s title—Korean for household or housekeeping—and a diffuser that emits the smells of apple pie, coffee, vomit, and excrement, suggest the original architectural referent. Here, she comes at her subject from the side, inducing loose or vulnerable associations to the kitchen, domestic labor, personal biography, and itinerancy. This form of abstraction is at once disorienting and placemaking, rendering the home strange and yet relatable.
Yang persistently unmoors domestic objects from their common use. She releases Venetian blinds from the constraint of the window, instead using them to create monumental, suspended sculptures (fig. 6) of beguiling folds. Here the material potential of the blinds is revealed through their very permeability—they simultaneously hide, reveal, create, and divide space. In others, she re-creates Sol LeWitt’s iconic white cube sculptures in white, or occasionally in black, venetian blinds (fig. 7). The sterile white slats fill in the spaces LeWitt left open, domesticating Western art history and its canonic artworks.
Many of Yang’s artworks integrate sensory experiences beyond vision, resulting in immersive environments that challenge logic-based traditions and instead experiment with other ways of knowing and experiencing the world. Series of Vulnerable Arrangements – Version Utrecht (2006) (fig. 8) included a humidifier, two infrared heaters, an industrial fan, and two scent emitters with motion sensors, one containing a scent named “Wood Fire” and the other “Fresh Linen.” Yang constructs haptic experiences where bodily sensations—feeling, smelling, and often hearing—operate beyond the purely visual and are integral to drawing together uneasy and unexpected relations between the objects and sensory encounters that comprise her installations.
Arrangement becomes an operative strategy in Yang’s artwork, where diverse references—physical, experiential, perceptive, and conceptual—are pulled together in loose association, allowing her to easily trespass across artistic and cultural traditions. Creating oblique relationships between references, she abstracts narratives and narrates abstractions that challenge perception alone and instead rely on belief systems beyond logic. This is demonstrated in her ongoing series of wallpapers that engage the atmospheric to address the climatic in both subject matter and approach. In Incantations – Entwinement, Endurance and Extinction (2022) (fig. 9), images of bells, double helixes, crystalline forms, serpents, coral reefs, forests, warped checked prints, and her white papercuts collide and coalesce into an unfamiliar landscape adorned with hundreds of small black pinwheels. Here, she compresses or flattens multiple references to create a nonhierarchical terrain that suggests narrative forms beyond the scientific. This seeking of other ways of knowing is prominent in her most recent series, Mesmerizing Mesh (fig. 10), where she incorporates paper-cutting traditions she has learned from different folk and shamanic practices around the world.
Yang traces other ways of knowing and being in the world that transcend the seemingly rational traditions of Western modernism and science. Seeking a common ground or perhaps a common visual language, she folds and often compresses traditions that are aesthetically similar but conceptually different to subvert colonial genealogies of Western modern art. A mystic leap, Yang weaves together new ways of experiencing art and the world.
Image credits:
Header: Haegue Yang, Non-Foldings – Cosmic Explosion #5, 2012 (detail). Spray paint on paper, framed. Two parts, each 50 5/8 x 36 5/8 (128.5 x 95 cm). Private collection. © STPI, Singapore. Image courtesy of the artist
(L): Haegue Yang, Floating Knowledge and Growing Craft – Silent Architecture Under Construction, 2013. Installation view of Journal of Bouba/kiki, Glasgow Sculpture Studios, Glasgow, Scotland, 2013. Powder-coated mild steel, powder-coated steel mesh, steel wire rope, jute twine, cotton twine, bells, metal rings, synthetic hair, vintage jewelery, glazed earthenware, iPod, iPod docking station, electric kettle, plastic basket, cardboard box, crochet hooks, cutter knife, pliers, measuring tape, stool. 78 3/4 x 57 7/8 x 29 1/8 inches (200 x 147 x 74 cm). Private collection, Seoul. Photo by Keith Hunter, courtesy of the artist
(R): Haegue Yang, Sallim, 2009. Installation view of Condensation, Korean Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2009. Powder-coated steel frame, powder-coated perforated metal plates, casters, aluminum venetian blinds, knitting yarn, acrylic mirror, IV stand, light bulbs, cable, zip ties, terminal strips, split rings, metal chains, fan, timer, dried garlic, plates, hot pad, scent emitters. 122 x 98 3/8 x 165 3/8 inches (310 x 250 x 420 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fund for the Twenty-First Century and gift of Agnes Gund, Glenn Fuhrman, and Jerry I. Speyer, 2010. Photo by Pattara Chanruechachai, courtesy of the artist