Haegue Yang is a South Korean artist who works mainly in sculpture and installation. After receiving a bachelor's degree from Seoul National University in 1994, Ms. Yang received a master's degree from Städelschule, where she is now a professor of fine arts. She currently lives and works in Berlin and Seoul.
Yang's work often places different household items in different configurations, exploring their significance beyond their typical functional use. Her installations sometimes engage multiple senses by combining light, smell, sound, and tactile materials to reposition and calibrate the viewer's perception. Common themes in Yang Huigui's work are displacement, mobility, familiarity and alienation. Yang Huigui is a particularly prolific contemporary artist – her 2018 catalogue of "Raisins" listed more than 1,400 works in her solo exhibition "ETA" at the Museum Ludwig.
For Yang Huigui, the drying rack is a metaphor that sums up our daily life, including basic activities related to daily household chores: cooking, cleaning, and laundry. The seemingly mundane objects and common appliances in our homes become manifestations of the complex processes that shape our lives. Many of Yang's works focus on domestic spaces, such as kitchens and bathrooms, as well as appliances such as radiators, gas stoves, and washing machines, addressing the practicality and ritual of building and maintaining homes.
A drying rack is a practical device that is usually folded up for storage when not in use. In the process of building the drying rack, Yang transforms these humble objects into his own expressive figures. Many of them are pieced together to form unique poses: carrying, acrobatic balance, or support, among others. Although these shelves look fragile and naked, they still reject the original secondary state of being folded up (the French title of the work translates as "non-foldable, naked"). Instead, they are now part of a sculptural alliance, with glowing bulbs mounted on long cables.
Light bulbs and cables often appear in so-called light sculptures as evidence of the invisible flow of energy to which many devices are connected. However, lighting has also become an important symbol of communication and interrelationship between these humble objects and the larger environment around them.
Yang Huigui has conducted an in-depth study of multimedia installations, and during this long year of isolation, she felt both prescient and sadly out of reach. Her diverse practice argues with intellectual delight with a wide range of sources and different mediums, resulting in immersive installations such as "In the Cone of Uncertainty," her late 2019 exhibition at The Bass, which focuses climate data and historical texts with old and new moving sculptural works, plant-filled chandeliers and wall graphics to tell the story of the museum's home in Miami.
Yang continued to present fragments of her speeches in 2020 and held exhibitions at Tate St Ives, MCAD Manila and the Art Gallery of Ontario, all showcasing the same level of intellectual rigor and craftsmanship. In an unconnected symbol, the peculiarity and interactivity of Yang Huigui's rabbit hole is a reminder of the enormous possibilities of installation and what is lost when art is confined to viewing on screen.
- Justin Camp
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