Words Eloise Hallo
Haegue Yang, born in South Korea in 1971, is the Hayward Gallery’s newest leading autere and one of the most interesting artists I have encountered in a long journey of contextualising contemporary art. Her works, as they are best termed — scratching at the walls of derogations like sculpture and painting — cannot, to the dismay of my reader, be ‘loosely understood’ as I am so fond of saying. It is perhaps for that reason my sit-down with Yung Ma (Leap Year’s curator) was so welcome an accomplice, helping to reckon with notions of ‘leaping’ and the varying acrobats it takes on within Yang’s oeuvre. So, I shall help my reader out too.
Yang’s understanding of ‘Leap Year’ echoes Sol LeWitt’s 1969 essay Sentences on Conceptual Art, and there are (at least in my humble thinking) two main clauses to which her bated breath can be seen most manifest: ‘1) Conceptual Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach’, and 12) — my personal favourite — ‘for each work of art that becomes physical there are many variations that do not’. As Ma would tell me (the two are close friends), Yang is a kind of mystic — avidly moving forward into what is both unknown to her and, quite potentially, unknowable — how can one begin to understand all the ghoulish creations of their art they have in fact not created, nor will create? Simply, she, as we all do, leaps between. She is constantly leaping between, and it is in this enchanting, teeming liminality the exhibition spends most of its time.
For me, it would be remiss to start anywhere other than Yang’s Venetian blinds (seen in installations below), which are perhaps the medium, if terminology allows, she is best known for. What takes particular fancy of mine is the gallery’s own account, that her blinds are a shared emblem of the domestic space and the self within it, for — as they note — the joint property of ‘travel[ling] through’. Their tilted slats with ‘the ability to divide space and limit visibility’, are never wholly potent over the sun, rain, or busying noise that fervents outside, as anyone with blinds of their own has cursed whilst hungover. Yet, this simple analogy is anything but, representing a most wholesome descriptor of separation between the id and ego: forever diffusing into one another, but seldom dialoging. Yang’s grasp is particularly heightened by her experience as an immigrant. As Ma would tell me, the experience of ‘always carrying alternating identities’, some of which exist domestically, some intramurally, and some, forever in-between.
As is, I’m sure, becoming increasingly apparent, questions of pre-determination exist loudly in Yang’s work, and it is this that she amuses herself with in Lacquer Paintings (aside). In a series she began as a student in Frankfurt, the young artist would experiment with lacquered wood left-out; its drying process would invite dust, soot, leaves, and insects, all a part of the art that would later join mesh, yard, and wig segments in its sticky sepulchre.
Ma and I would agree that it was in this early period Yang came to learn ideas of accidental and intentional, returning to LeWitt’s glowing take on artistic butterfly effect. And, its introspective chorale to the varying degrees of ourselves we may well imagine never coming to be, had the dust and soot settled differently on our cosmic artist’s table.
Yang’s comprehension of the fixed and unfixed can also be understood more laterally, relating to the idea of convention; that term which, more often that otherwise, depicts a history of ‘fixed-ness’. It’s here where Yang’s experience as both artist and ‘outsider’ to the Western typology she would encounter at Städelschule, Venn. And her thwart plays out in Leap Year’s repossession of Yves Klein’s famous blue, a chiming reminder of western art’s tradition to clamorously believe in it’s own superiority. Klein, famed for his self-professed creation of ‘International Klein Blue’, exemplifies the sinister nuptials between art and capitalist imperialism. For me, Yang relates the stale state of seeing in such imagined monochrome, artistically, to real-world repression — harkening within the belief you may own something ubiquitous — both of which find no footing in Leap Year’s kaleidoscope… for which we are perhaps safer leaving Klein off the guest list, lest he find other colours to patent.
In the hope my reader will forgive the following to and fro on the Western Front, it’s Shakespeare’s notes on negative capability that inspire much of my (admittedly occidental) understanding of what I will call Yang’s ‘twoness’; to say one thing and mean, or possibly mean, another. And it is Yang’s ability for simultaneous ‘oneness’ and ‘twoness’ that we see mostly plainly, playfully humouring, in the work’s title. ‘Leap Year’ is, in one respect, an academic note. In quote another, it is a fact of the year we find ourselves in.
Yang’s penchant for married multitudes perfumes throughout, yet it is most tantamount in Star Crossed Rendezvous after Yun, the exhibition’s final composition — in all senses of its term — wedding sculpture and sound. The construction of multilayered blinds (pictured below) is accompanied by Isang Yun’s Double Concerto (1977) — Korean composer and political dissident — who’s harmonic tale of star-crossed lovers represents a countryman’s hoping fate of Korea’s re-unification. Just as Yun’s music is composed, so too are Yang’s blinds. Corporeally different, they are unified by the shared artistic purpose they serve. Similarly, the shutters exist in monochromes. Though of differing shades and levels, they rendezvous by design; as is true of Double Concerto, aptly-titled and extraordinary for its two solo instruments, rather than the concerto’s typical monodrame.
In my understanding of Star Crossed Rendezvous after Yun, Yang’s flirtation with ‘one’ and ‘two’, comments on the notion that both possibilities must co-exist for eventual unity. As in the melody and structure of the piece, that we can be separate as individuals but unified as a body. In the wider sense of her work, it creates ‘hybrid attempts at language’, as Ma would note, ‘… and I suppose a new kind of rhetoric within that?’, as I would in fact suppose: parle-ing in shared experience, or concept, rather than typical conversation.
And it is this survey in communication that Yang tussles with too in Carsick and Cove; ‘The Space Between’ as subheads the scribbles of my notebook. In the former, a series (two relatives of which are pictured below), Yang traces the paragraphs of local newspapers encountered along her travels. Unable to understand the language of its writing, she highlights only the paper’s chasms — creating scribbles of her own that attempt to find meaning anew in the chronicles’ otherwise vast unknowability to her. In the latter (below), the first in her Non-Foldings series, origami sculptures were videoed on a paper reel; the canvas Cove would ultimately become. Met with black spray paint, Yang was interested in the kind of physical shadow their obstruction would leave. As the gallery-plaque reads, ‘how [the] process reduced the three-dimensional, folded objects into an image that evoked the origami’s absence as well as its origin as a flat sheet of paper.’
What chimed with me in conversation with Ma was a remark on Yang’s ability for ‘dimension in flatness’, and it’s in these two works I see it most true. Yang is concerned with gaps — in possibility, in identity, and in what is ‘known’— three things that tend to tether us to our realities. Reality, however, is untrustworthy — particularly to mystics like the conceptual artist in question — for whom the flat can be three-dimensional, or four-dimensional, or perhaps five, and who finds in ‘oneness’ the possibility for ‘two’. Yang’s want to seek meaning in absent narratives rebels against a long and, for lack of better-term, boring history of seeing only a thing’s eventual, its landing point rather than its leap, or the leaps that could have been.
By the exhibit’s crescendo, Star Crossed Rendezvous after Yun, we too have been moved. As the light traces in a spotlight across the piece’s Venetian blinds, I find myself looking not only at, but around, its beam; seeking story from both where I’m led and where I’m not, from what is illuminated and what is hidden.
I’ll be the first to admit I’m no foe to the overcomplex, so it may be wittingly best advised by our inside man, Yung Ma:
E: What would you say to OVERDUE readers who’ve not yet seen Yang’s ‘Leap Year’?
Y: Come, see for yourselves.
Haegue Yang: Leap Year will show at the Hayward Gallery, London, until the 5th of January 2025.
All imagery unless otherwise cited: ‘Installation view of Haegue Yang: Leap Year, 2024. Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery’.
Profile image of artist Haegue Yang, 2024. Photo: Cheongjin Keem, Courtesy of Kukje Gallery.
Sol LeWitt, ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’, 0–9 (January, 1969) Accessed Online
‘Lacquer Paintings’, Haegue Yang: Leap Year, 2024. Own image. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery’.
‘Haegue Yang, Carsick Drawing – Toward Huu Nghi and Youyiguan #1 and #2, 2016 Installation view at the South London Gallery, 2019. Photo: Andy Stagg. Courtesy the artist and South London Gallery