Haegue Yang

Haegue Yang (Korean: 양혜규; born December 12, 1971) is a South Korean artist primarily working in sculpture and installation. After receiving her B.F.A from Seoul National University in 1994, Yang received an M.A. from Städelschule where she now teaches as a professor of Fine Arts. She currently lives and works in Berlin and Seoul.
With the statement “I believe that out of the alienation one can mobilize the unusual strength to sympathize with the others,” Yang seeks to embrace vulnerability, thus exploring themes that may include “individual and national identity, displacement, isolation, and community.” Yang also ensures an ambiguity to avoid “tying herself to one [identity] based on gender, race or geography.” Therefore, Yang's work often places disparate household objects, including yarn, light fixtures, and fans, into alternative configurations, exploring meanings they can take on outside of their typical functional uses. She is particularly well known for her installations incorporating venetian blinds that transform galleries through their filtering of light, segmentation of space, and large scale that requires audiences to find multiple viewpoints in order to see the work. Her installations using materials like bells, moving theater lights, and scent diffusers engage multiple senses by incorporating lights, smells, sounds, and tactile materials that reorient and recalibrate viewers' perception. With the additional exploration of her mural-like graphic wall pieces, juxtaposition and abstraction are included for an enhanced dramatic, immersive scenery. Yang draws from a wide array of references, including her own biography, historical events, film, and literature, to create installations like Sadong 30 (2006) and performances like The Malady of Death (2010-ongoing). A number of her works consider movement both within the exhibition space with moving sculptures such as Dress Vehicles (2012), and on a global scale with outdoor commissions like Migratory DMZ Birds on Asymmetric Lens (2020). Overall, the materiality, references, and engagement in Yang's art create a "communicative way of sharing life," by allowing individuals within an intervening space to "imagine events with others."
Yang is a particularly prolific contemporary artist–her 2018 catalogue raisonné, published in conjunction with her solo show "ETA" at Museum Ludwig, lists over 1,400 works. She has been the recipient of a number of awards, including the Republic of Korea Cultural and Art Award (Presidential Citation) in the Visual Arts Sector in 2018. Her work has been collected by museums like The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in South Korea, Museum of Modern Art, and Museum Ludwig.
Yang was born in South Korea in 1971. Her father, Hansoo Yang (born 1945, Seoul), is a journalist and her mother, Misoon Kim (born 1945, Incheon), is a writer. Hansoo Yang worked for an international construction company after he was dismissed from his job at the Dong-A Ilbo along with 160 colleagues for protesting censorship under Park Chung-hee's regime. Both Hansoo Yang and Misoon Kim were active in the Minjung Movement.
Haegue Yang received her Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.) in 1994 from Seoul National University in Korea with a focus on sculpture. In 1995, she moved to Germany to study with artist Georg Herold at Städelschule. She was an exchange student at Cooper Union in New York City from 1996 to 1997. She graduated in 1999 with her Master's (Meisterschüler).
After receiving her B.F.A., Yang moved to Germany and began her artistic career in the late 1990s. Yang participated in her first show outside of Städelschule at Frankfurt's rraum, an alternative exhibition space in the apartment of Meike Behm and Peter Lütje. Her first solo show was held in 2000 at Berlin publisher and dealer Barbara Wien's gallery, after Wien met Yang at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1999 and subsequently visited her studio. Initial difficulties selling Yang's work led to the gallery being unable to store the exhibited pieces, an episode which led to Yang's installation work Storage Piece (2004)–a pile of crates filled with Yang's work on top of shipping pallets.
Yang is currently based in Berlin and Seoul. Her main studio is located in Kreuzberg, Germany. She has been a professor of Fine Arts at the Städelschule since 2017. Her extensive oeuvre includes sculpture, installation, collage, photography, video, and performance. Curator and art critic Nicholas Bourriaud argues that in spite of the diversity of techniques and mediums, Yang's work is ultimately sculptural in its dealing with the fundamental question of the presence of the body in space.
Her sculptures often feature household objects and mundane materials. The objects range from drying racks, lightbulbs, yarn, electrical cables, and Venetian blinds. Yang attributes part of her interest in domestic objects to her upbringing in Korea during the 70s and 80s. Yang sometimes pairs these objects with additional sensorial components, such as steam from a humidifier, temperature changes using a heater and air conditioner, and diffused smells in iterations of her "Series of Vulnerable Arrangements" (2006-8).
Yang’s style in her works could be defined “between minimalism and conceptualism” that creates “a kind of modernist paradox.” However, there is a “sense of distance” her work carries in order to “defamiliarize her modernist inspirations.” Ideally, she promotes an “anachronistic lens…to view present conditions” and “revise our understanding of modernist abstraction.” Therefore, while Yang states that her work could be seen as conceptual in its broadest definition, and thus drawing from conceptual art from the 1960s and 70s, she believes a redefinition of the term conceptual art is needed for determining its role in contemporary art now. Yang argues that for her practice, abstraction does not negate the possibility for narrative in her work, but instead "allows a narrative to be achieved without constituting its own limits." Art historian Joan Kee contends that Yang's interest in formalism "is marked by a sustained attention to morphology, to structure."
When responding to questions around the role of feminism in her work, Yang argues that while sculptures like Sallim (shown at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009) can engage with issues around gender in references to housework, they have multiple valences that can extend into religion, immigration, and class. She has also pushed against the critical emphasis on her diasporic status in interpretations of her practice. In thinking about the relationship between aesthetics and politics, Yang cites Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose work was shown with Yang in the 2011 show "The Sea Wall": "I say the best thing about aesthetics is that the politics which permeate it are totally invisible."
Yang began using Venetian blinds in her work in 2006 for a show at BAK, Utrecht. She became interested in the way blinds can filter light and thus alter conditions of visibility for the viewer. Yang's use of blinds reconfigure exhibition spaces through the interplay of transparency and opacity, both disconnecting and connecting different parts of exhibition spaces. Her large-scale installation works such as Accommodating the Epic Dispersion--On Non-cathartic Volume of Dispersion (2012) refuse a single point of apprehension, transforming space in conjunction with light and color. The use of venetian blinds in this work requires visitors to interact and connect with the work "physically...perceptually...[and] conceptually."
A number of Yang's sculptures incorporate household light fixtures and their wiring as pre-fabricated sculptural components. Yang's interest in light as a sculptural medium stems from its ability to claim physical space as a distinct, and sometimes even anthropomorphic, object. Within one of her sculptural installations Mountains of Encounter (2008), moving spotlights are even utilized to imitate "the effect of searchlights" and alternate the "projection of shadows."
Light plays an integral role in Sadong 30 (2006), a work made at Yang's grandmother's former home in Incheon which the artist describes as her only site-specific piece. Yang reconnected the house's electricity in order to power string lights, illuminating both paper origami as well as the dirt and debris which accumulated after the house's abandonment.
Particular works of Yang's invoke meetings of historical figures, such as the Venetian blinds in Red Broken Mountainous Labyrinth (2008) which refer to Korean independence fighter Kim San (1905-1938) and American journalist Nym Wales (Helen Foster Snow, 1907–1997), and the blinds in Lethal Love (2008) that reference head of the German Green Party Petra Kelly (1947-1992) and former Bundeswehr General Gert Bastian (1923-presumably 1992).
In addition to historical figures, Yang often references authors and filmmakers, including Korean-Japanese essayist Suh Kyungsik, author Primo Levi, novelist George Orwell, filmmaker Nagisa Oshima, and author Marguerite Duras (Yearning Melancholy Red, 2008; Malady of Death, 2010-ongoing). Yang's interest in work by or centered on diasporic figures stems from her research into people such as Suh, who had written a book on Levi, and consideration of the parallels between seemingly disparate figures spanning multiple geographies and times. Yang is less interested in establishing direct linkages between them and is instead concerned with the gaps between them that allow her to "transform it into an area of productive fiction." Her work exploring this "area of productive fiction" allows her to consider the connections between public and private life.
Beginning in 2010 during her residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in the United States, Yang has staged a series of readings of the French writer Marguerite Duras' 1982 novella The Malady of Death. The language, performers, and visual components of each reading have varied.
In December 2015, as part of Mobile M+: Live Art, Yang presented The Malady of Death: Écrire et Lire, which consisted of a staging of The Malady of Death at Hong Kong's Sunbeam Theatre and the publication of the novella's first Chinese translation. Held over two nights, the opening performance saw Hong Kong writer Hon Lai-chu recite Duras' text. The staging included a burning mosquito coil, moving lights, and intermittent background projections of an image of the French actress Jeanne Balibar.
To date, The Malady of Death has been performed at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2010); Namsan Arts Center, Seoul (2010); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, (2013); and Mobile M+: Live Art, Hong Kong (2015), Performa (2023).
Some of Yang's sculptures center around the theme of movement, either by using materials commonly understood to be mobile (e.g. moving theater lights in her venetian blind pieces) or by creating kinetic pieces which require performers to interact with the work, such as Rotating Notes--Dispersed Episodes I-V (2013). Works referencing diasporic figures and multiple geographies, such as Coordinates of Speculative Solidarity (2019), also consider the movement of individuals across national borders and reflect on the divisions that these boundaries create.
The title of Yang's solo exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum refers to ideas present in both Daoism and Western folklore of traveling large distances with each step.
Dress Vehicles (2012)
Yang's Dress Vehicles consist of aluminum frames surrounding permeable surfaces made of blinds, yarn, or macramé. The sculptures include handles which performers use to move the pieces around the exhibition space.
Inspired by Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballet from 1922, "Sonic Figures" is a series of intricate sculptures made of numerous brass-plated bells affixed to wheeled steel stands. Performers rotate the pieces using handles in order to make the bells ring. M+ both commissioned and later acquired her piece Sonic Rescue Ropes.
This outdoor commission for the twelfth Sharjah Biennial took shape partially due to Yang's personal interest in the United Arab Emirates and the historical implications of Korean workers in the country. Yang's father worked in Libya, Liberia, and other countries in Africa and the Middle East as part of the Jungdong (Middle East) boom that brought more than one million South Korean workers to the Gulf region. For the outdoor portion of the work, Yang brought together vent sculptures on brick and concrete block pedestals with a sandalwood vestibule, satellite dish, and walls made of steel tubes and corrugated metal sheets. The indoor part of the installation titled Fathers' Room featured a spare room with palm mats, a mattress topper, a lamp, and community newspapers.
Lingering Nous (2016)
Lingering Nous (2016) is a large-scale commissioned blind installation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France. Featuring aluminum venetian blinds and LED tubes, the hanging structure stretches three levels of the institution. As the word Nous refers to the human mind and "understanding what is true or real," the installation entitles "the potential to explore this capacity of the human world further."
Yang's commissioned work for the 2020-21 "Ground/work" exhibition at the Clark Art Institute imagines a meeting between birds of New England and Korea's Demilitarized Zone in order to draw parallels between the ecological diversity of the two regions. Unlike Yang's past sculptures, which typically are shown indoors and made of found materials, the three sculptures scattered around the Clark's grounds are composed of stone pedestals with 3D-printed biocompatible birdbaths for the animals in the area. The birdbaths are also a reference to the sound of birds audible on the broadcast of the April 2018 inter-Korean summit.
In 2023, Yang was part of the search committee that chose Emma Enderby as the new director of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art. That same year, she was a member of the visual arts jury for the annual DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. As part of the inaugural “Artist-to-Artist” initiative at Frieze London in 2023, Yang proposed Ayoung Kim for a solo exhibition at the fair. At the same year, she was ranked in No. 71 in the annual list The Power 100, published by the British contemporary art magazine Art Review.
Numerous critics have noted her prolific output and ever-expanding set of references. Some, like Andrew Russeth, praise her multi-layered artworks, while others like Roberta Smith and Karen Rosenberg identify some works to be stronger than others.
Critics, such as Elizabeth Fullerton and Riccardo Venturi, have highlighted the playful and open elements of even Yang's most complex works. Mimi Chu asserts that Yang challenges the viewer's desire for "narrative mastery" in her works that function as a "multisensory exquisite corpse."
Art historian Joan Kee argues that Yang's artwork "poses nothing less than the problem of formalism: What is its place within today's supposedly globalized art world, which prides itself precisely on having overcome the reductivism associated with formalist methods of producing and understanding art?" However, she also notes that Yang's concerted efforts at exploring the formal qualities of art may be precisely what has allowed her to gain visibility in the global art world: "In its studied, almost ritualistic attention to the possibilities of form, her art asks whether such attention is in fact the only viable means, other than explicit vocalizations of cultural difference, for a nonwhite and non-Euro-American artist to attain global status."
Yang participated in the 2006 São Paulo Art Biennial, 55th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, 2008 Turin Triennale, dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Biennale de Lyon, Sharjah Biennial, and 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. She represented South Korea in the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Yang's first exhibition in the United States, titled "Brave New Worlds", was held in 2007 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The artist also had solo exhibitions in Asian institutions including the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, and Leuum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul.
Sadong 30 (2006) was "one of Yang's first comeback pieces" at her grandmother's old house. Yang emphasizes the house in such a rough and ruined state—"missing windows, peeling wallpaper and holes in the ceiling" with household objects featured in a mess—in order to leave "a universal pain..."
For her solo exhibition in the Korean pavilion for the 53rd Venice Biennale, Yang presented three works including Sallim (2009), an installation modeled on the kitchen in her Berlin home and studio. Also included in the exhibition were Double and Halves—Events with Nameless Neighbors (2009), a video essay filmed in Seoul and Venice, and Series of Vulnerable Arrangements—Voice and Wind (2009), another large-scale installation with venetian blinds ventilators, and scent emitters featured.
For this solo exhibition running from January 2, 2011, to March 4, 2011, Yang presented works on three floors of the Kunsthaus Bregenz. The first floor featured pieces including Fishing (1995), Unfolding Places (2004), Restrained Courage (2004), and Squandering Negative Spaces (2006), Gymnastics of the Foldables (2006), and Three Kinds in Transition (2008). On the second floor, her Venetian blind installation Cittadella (2011) occupied the entire space. On the third floor, Yang installed a work titled Warrior Believer Lover (2011), which consisted of thirty-three light sculptures built on wheeled stands. Three times a day, Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps was played in the exhibition space.
Yang states that the title's multiple connotations include the end of a long journey, the divine, and a self-reflexive reference to her arrival as a globally-recognized artist.
As a part of dOCUMENTA (13), Yang's installation–set in an empty freight depot of Kassel's former railway station–incorporated black aluminum blinds that automatically moved up and down, and opened and closed.