Rice Bowl With Lid Predicting Peony Leaves Asain Art Meaning Korea
Arts and Letters
An Artist Whose Muse Is Loneliness
Haegue Yang seeks isolation and then mines the accompanying confusion to reflect on the nature of belonging.
WHEN THE Creative person Haegue Yang shows onetime artworks in new places, she likes to create a fresh piece that links the exhibition to the local context. For her electric current presentation at the Bass, a museum in Miami Beach, Yang asked the curators what the region's famously multicultural residents take in common. A particular holiday? A certain nutrient? Non really, they told her. "But isn't there any commonality you can think of?" she asked. The curators looked at one some other. "Hurricanes," they said, half joking.
The notion of vehement storms as a bounden force fascinated the 48-year-old South Korean artist, whose sculptures, room-size environments and videos often address themes of individual and national identity, displacement, isolation and customs. After months of meteorological research, Yang produced a new piece of work for the Bass show: "Coordinates of Speculative Solidarity," a cluttered floor-to-ceiling digital collage swirling with tempest-tracking symbols, satellite photos of Floridian McMansions, distorted palm trees and sinister gyres that covers vast swathes of the museum like dystopian wallpaper. The show is called "In the Cone of Doubtfulness," which in forecasting terms refers to hurricane projection only might as well be a description of Yang's overall philosophy.
Over the past decade, Yang'due south work has appeared at some of the almost esteemed gimmicky art forums in the world — including Documenta in Kassel, Federal republic of germany, and the Venice Biennale — and she recently filled the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York with an ambitious installation blending sculpture and performance. With sensual, melancholy works fabricated from venetian blinds and other domestic objects, Yang has managed to escape the conspicuous identity politics that ascertain much of the contemporary art world. "Every institution at present wants to exist global and to accept a more international and cosmopolitan point of view, simply what does that really mean?" asked Stuart Comer, MoMA's chief curator of media and operation, who organized Yang's exhibition. At its worst, information technology tin hateful that non-Western artists are tacitly required to represent (or perform) the cultures they came from. Just as the institutions of the 1980s and '90s seized on artists creating work around their socially marginalized identities (female, gay, nonwhite), it sometimes feels equally though the current fine art earth showcases people born outside the Usa or Europe just on the grounds that their art refers to their heritage. Yang, however — an artist who is non known to spend more than than a few days or weeks at a fourth dimension in any given identify — takes a stubbornly elliptical arroyo, refusing to embody any unmarried nationality or perspective in her work. By embracing ambiguity, Yang has found a way to brand art about identity without tying herself to one based on gender, race or geography. "You cannot reduce it to a political one-liner," said Comer.
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The artist herself is like the at-home center of a loftier-velocity hurricane. In 2019 lonely, she was in fifteen shows on four continents. Remarks on how decorated she must be tend to be greeted with the sort of wary skepticism with which one might regard a doctor's suggestion to lay off the practise and accept a cigarette. Yang acknowledges that she might exist "doing a lot," but on the other mitt, she suggests, notions of "rest" and "costless time" are "sometimes too neoliberal to protect blindly. When passion and devotion goes over the border, is it something to condemn?" She is always working, and has spent her career deliberately isolating herself from friends and family as a kind of artistic method. The only downside is existential: "What comes along with the intensity of the work is you almost lose yourself," she said, although fifty-fifty this status has its advantages: "I call back the confusion is good to have."
Lately, Yang's success has kept her shuttling betwixt her studios in Seoul and Berlin, a professorship in Frankfurt and her many exhibitions. In Nov, she fabricated a brief appearance in Graz, Austria, to install work in a grouping show at the city'southward contemporary art museum, Kunsthaus Graz. We spoke in an old-fashioned cafe with scuffed parquet floors and a resplendent strudel that Yang discovered a few years ago when she had a solo exhibition at the aforementioned institution. She wore a roomy blackness sweatshirt over a white collared shirt, Yohji Yamamoto skirt-pants and an air of pensive cocky-reflection. She mentioned her solitude early, and I asked her if she e'er gets alone. Yang, who frequently communicates in diagrams, reached for a pen and drew ii circles on a page. "Hither is loneliness," she said, pointing to i of them, "and hither is humbleness. If I didn't travel, I imagine I'd feel much more confident, but not and then humbled." Yang is single past design, and has no children and few close friends. A writer whose work resonates with Yang, the French novelist Marguerite Duras, once said, "One does not find solitude, i creates it." In fact, now that she'south found success, her biggest struggle is maintaining a sense of breach akin to what she experienced during her student years in Federal republic of germany. The currents of personal doubt and instability that give her art its enigmatic allure stem from this nomadic condition: "Loneliness," she said, "is the toll I pay." To continue producing meditations on belonging, Yang cannot beget to feel at home.
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YANG'Southward Involvement IN contentious borders — of nations, between neighbors and within 1'southward self — stems partly from the serial of separations that marked her childhood. She was born in Seoul in 1971, 26 years later on the Korean Peninsula had been divided, amid political upheaval that would cleave her family apart. Yang's father, along with 160 colleagues, was fired from his chore every bit a newspaper journalist for protesting government censorship when she was 3. After years of unemployment, he — and hundreds of thousands of other South Koreans — left the family unit behind in the '80s to observe construction piece of work in the Centre East. Decades after, Yang would address his absence in an installation at the 2015 Sharjah Biennial 12, in which she constructed a labyrinth of cinder blocks, turbine vents, steel grates and several rooms, including one where a Korean TV channel played on mute. Her mother, a teacher who became an author so an activist, raised Yang and her twin brothers alone. Not long after Yang's father's return in 1988, her parents divorced; her mother moved away to join the workers' and trade-matrimony movement soon after. Yang was not politically engaged at the fourth dimension, simply these experiences became intrinsic parts of her piece of work, as did the rapid industrialization of Southward Korea, which underscores her interest in labor and the effects of mass-produced goods on traditional crafts and the natural globe. A single sculpture of hers might include mitt-knit textiles, light bulbs, bamboo roots and hamster tunnels, all dangling from a metal garment rack on wheels. Tellingly, Yang, who is never in one place for very long, often makes utilize of the kinds of household items people only learn when they have settled somewhere: cans of artichoke hearts, umbrella stands, fridge magnets, towels, love apple paste.
Yang knew she wanted to be an artist early, and earned her B.F.A. from Seoul National University. She would have stayed, simply the school rejected her graduate application, and so, in 1994, she moved to Frankfurt to attend the Städelschule. The feel was harrowing but securely formative: the genesis of her identity as an outsider. She arrived barely able to speak German, and fifty-fifty the simplest interactions would expose how fiddling she knew about European languages, community and institutions. The difficulties she experienced, not just linguistically but as an Asian woman in a homogeneous white milieu, made Yang realize that selves are delicate things — they can break in transit. "I accept the feeling as if my person, like my utilise of the German language language, were characterized by incompleteness, as if information technology had a cleft," she wrote in an early text slice from 2000 called "Science of Communication — A Study on How to Make Myself Understood." The fractured, confessional document, which she presented on a apparently typewritten page taped to a gallery wall, was an practice in self-exposure. As uncomfortable as this period was, it arguably forms the core of her practise. The embarrassments of non beingness able to communicate effectively or to pass as a local remain creatively benign for Yang: "I believe that out of the alienation one can mobilize the unusual strength to sympathize with the others," she once said. Vulnerability, she oftentimes emphasizes, is a land to embrace, not motility beyond.
For her thesis show in 1998, Yang presented a big case on metal legs, the kind that might display artifacts or specimens. Inside was a selection of her work to engagement, including a plaster cast of her manus and an Ikea mug with her proper name written on it. The piece, "Anthology of Haegue Archives," might be read as ironic: a humorously cocky-of import gesture from an obscure young artist whose career was a long way off from institutional support. Only, as Yang has noted, it also might have been "an act of self-empowerment by an immigrant creative person" at a moment when gaining international art-world recognition as an Asian woman was practically unheard-of. "Information technology just didn't exist," she said. Role models were scarce. The Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who is known for performances in which he cooks and serves meals for big audiences, "was the just i who wasn't painted by Orientalism," she said, meaning that he was seen equally an artist starting time, an Asian creative person second.
Epitome
By the time Yang graduated from the Städelschule in 1999, even so, the art world's borders and barricades were condign more porous, and she began to brand a small-scale name for herself. She benefited from the post-Cold War moment itself, which was increasingly interconnected. "We talk virtually a 'globalized world' every bit if it was such a shallow, trendy thing, but that merging of cultures had such a big impact on my biography," she said. "Europe became a very different society." Still, Yang remained clashing about its effects on a personal level, and her art became a running commentary on her perpetual feelings of deportation. Often these themes manifested in an amore for objects that accept lost their usefulness only linger on, out of step with their environment. One early piece of work, "Furnitury Objects — Students' Union Satie" (2000) involves a small table she salvaged from the streets of Frankfurt aslope a neglected chair borrowed from a friend and a demote from a theater. Fliers atop the tabular array offered musings about our capacity to overlook banal elements of our surroundings, about belongings as expressions of their owners, approaches to furnishing institutional spaces and ambience compositions by Erik Satie. The dealer Barbara Wien gave Yang her first solo bear witness in Berlin in 2000 and began taking her piece of work to fairs, only the pieces often failed to sell. By 2004, neither Yang nor the gallery could afford to store her previous work or fund the production of new pieces — a dilemma that inadvertently gave rise to her start major installation: "Storage Slice," a pile of crates full of her piece of work, stacked atop shipping pallets. Demoralized and in debt, Yang decided that she had "struggled enough." She scaled back her do and got a full-fourth dimension job organizing talks for the Frankfurt Book Off-white.
One of Yang's beginning big comeback pieces, and the one that launched her career, was 2006'due south "Sadong xxx," which took place in Incheon, a port city in Due south Korea, inside her late grandmother'south sometime house, abandoned for almost a decade. Information technology was a ruin, with missing windows, peeling wallpaper and holes in the ceiling. Yang placed broken and intact mirrors, a folding laundry rack, lights, an oscillating fan and clusters of fragile origami stars within the derelict rooms. Visitors could unlock the house with a code and stay at that place alone for every bit long every bit they wanted. It was a work so personal that being at that place might have felt like an intrusion, only Yang's subtle gestures tapped a universal pain — of loss, of change, of our shared inability to keep things from ending.
The piece also began the seemingly countless exhibition bout she's been on always since. That same year, at the São Paulo Biennial, Yang considered her perpetual displacement in "Series of Vulnerable Arrangements — Blind Room." Blackness venetian blinds hung from the ceiling surrounding a video trilogy in which Yang muses on being both geographically and existentially lost. A humidifier, an infrared heater, scent emitters and an air-conditioner suffused the space with shifting notes of sensuality, discomfort and nostalgia. The blinds, permeable barriers between the public and individual realms, remain one of Yang's signature materials. In her piece of work, they are metaphors for obscurity and exposure, symbols of contact between people and of willful isolation.
Paradigm
AT THE Aforementioned time her stature was ascent, Yang was becoming suspicious of the commercial art world and questioning whether participating in it might blunt her intellectual edge. Until a year and a half ago, when she finally moved, her Berlin apartment had nothing in it except a futon on the floor and a lighting system she rigged to switch on and off while she was away. The Mexican artist Damián Ortega, who met Yang at the São Paulo Biennial and became ane of her few confidants, recalls going to dinner with Yang and his dealers, the owners of Kurimanzutto gallery, in Mexico Metropolis. They went to a "cute" ceviche eating house, but Yang ordered just a unmarried bowl of rice. "It was a very provocative gesture," said Ortega. After the meal, he asked her why she did it. "Nobody will agree me from the natural language," she told him, meaning that she could non be bought with fancy dinners. "She did these kind of radical things," he said, to engage with the fine art world on her own terms. "She always creates atmospheric condition for her own security or her own confidence."
Today, Yang has fabricated peace with the market place. She is represented by galleries on three continents and her works are a ubiquitous presence at art fairs, where her larger pieces sell for six figures. "I go on losing my faith, but and then I regain information technology," she said. The art globe might exist "vain" and "parasitic," but "at the same time, this is likewise often a shelter for so many small voices" with "and then much more tolerance that you cannot discover anywhere else." This isn't to say she doesn't still come home "depressed" and "disgusted" from some of the obligatory social functions that come with the chore, but she has likewise come up to comprehend her position within the industry, if somewhat ambivalently. "I want to be critical merely at the same [time] I don't want to be someone who keeps complaining," she said.
Notwithstanding, Yang remains a grudging, and sometimes bad-mannered, participant in fine art world rituals. At the opening of the group exhibition at Kunsthaus Graz, a futuristic space that has more in common architecturally with the Death Star than with the typical art museum, she spent the party perched on a small leather sofa at the terminate of a long, glassy blackness chimera of a room overlooking the otherwise quaint Austrian metropolis. Crouched there, equally far away as possible from the throng effectually the bar, she told me that she has always felt irrelevant at openings, ever since her get-go show: "like my chore is done and I should disappear." She gestured at the crowd of people sipping glasses of Gelber Muskateller. "I'm not so good at celebrating," she said. Information technology's not just professional person engagements — Yang stopped accepting invitations to birthdays and weddings, even those of close friends, a long time ago. "I used to suffer those things even if I couldn't savour them," she said. "Information technology'south a tough task to be my friend." Ortega emphatically agreed. "Sometimes I see her and I spend the next day totally depressed because she's very critical," he said.
Epitome
Yang is the first to admit she can be manic and "inhumane" when she is planning exhibitions. The curators she likes best are the ones who claiming her. "She's very demanding and non everyone can stand information technology," said Barbara Steiner, the director of Kunsthaus Graz, who curated Yang's solo exhibition there. "I accept colleagues who told me they will never, e'er piece of work with Haegue once again." Steiner, who invited Yang to come up back and participate in the group evidence, dismissed these complaints. The feel is worth it for the rare effect of Yang's work, she said: "You never know what it is, exactly. It feels familiar, only it's alien." And Yang is loyal to the people who support her, tantrums and all. She continues to include Wien, an early champion of her work, in the acknowledgments for projects the dealer did not straight fund, such as one of her presentations at the Venice Biennale. Eungie Joo, who curated the Korean Pavilion that Yang was a part of in 2009, said, "We had to credit Barbara because Haegue wouldn't have been able to psychologically maintain herself without people similar Barbara ever believing in her."
ON A Recent afternoon at MoMA, more than than 100 people were looking at Yang's installation in the atrium: a menagerie of large abstract sculptures covered in thousands of gleaming, spherical bells. Five performers danced the wheeled pieces around the infinite in lilting arcs. Trails of black and iridescent vinyl polygons fanned across the floor and up the walls, as though an elaborate origami creature was in the process of unfolding itself. Sound of chirping birds played through speakers overhead.
The hypnotic spectacle was enough to end tourists, and even regulars ("This is the strangest affair I've ever seen at MoMA," 1 human being said to his companion as the sculptures jingled by). But the installation was also laced with ambiguous references to historical figures — the Swiss polymath Sophie Taeuber-Arp, the Eastern-European mystic K.I. Gurdjieff, the exiled Korean composer Isang Yun — and to political events. The chirps were inadvertently captured by reporters while attempting to record a recent private conversation between the leaders of N and South Korea. These elements were illuminated in the nearby wall text, but the bells went unexplained. They allude to Korean shamanism, Yang told me. Shamans in training will get door to door begging for unwanted metal — erstwhile spoons and other jetsam — which they melt and recast into rattles. These instruments, said Yang, "train their ears to listen to ghosts." Rattles in manus, the shamans human activity as messengers between the human and spirit worlds. In a way, Yang is also a kind of translator — her works incorporate unlikely conversations, between craft, engineering, brainchild and narrative, in which ane can hear echoes of the by and whispers of the cataclysmic present.
For all her momentum and ambition, Yang sometimes questions whether she is capable of sustaining her electric current levels of travel and production. "Can I really digest all this and give something back?" she wondered aloud at the cafe in Graz. "I don't know if I can continue doing only this. Then far I can maintain it but … what then? I don't know. I don't know." She stared off at the city she would leave in less than a solar day. Yang is unremarkably moving too fast to think well-nigh slowing down.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/t-magazine/haegue-yang.html
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