Within minutes of arriving at Leap Year, the first major British survey of South Korean artist Haegue Yang’s work, through a noisy curtain of bells and past a room full of clothes horses adorned with electrical cables, I witness an ‘activation’. There are looming aluminium frames covered with Venetian blinds, hulking rattan blobs sprouting cacti and desert flowers and a petite cherry-wood sculpture sheathed in holographic vinyl film, all being wheeled around the upper mezzanine of the Hayward Gallery by a group of staid facilitators. The space, titled Movement, exhibits a medley of mediums, materials and sensory experiences that typify the show at large and provide a fitting introduction to Yang’s magpie artistic practice.
Based between Seoul and Berlin, Yang has received multiple awards for her immersive artworks, including the 13th Benesse Prize in 2022, and has staged solo exhibitions at Helsinki Art Museum, the National Gallery of Australia, SMAK and Pinacoteca de São Paulo. A graduate of Seoul National University Fine Arts College and Städelschule, she is best known for large-scale installations which decontextualise household items – like drying racks, fans and the recurring motif of Venetian blinds – and loosely explore themes of domesticity, migration, exile and spirituality. She often juxtaposes such everyday ephemera with folk craftsmanship to confuse the distinction between modern and pre-modern; those rattan blobs were created in collaboration with artisans in the Philippines using a weaving technique called ‘randing’, while a series of collages in another room were made with hanji, a paper used to fashion ritual objects in Korean shamanism.
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Yang’s habit of physically folding, ripping and rearranging materials to give them new meaning extends to the miscellany of references within her body of work, which are plucked from disparate times and places and stitched back together to create a manic kind of cultural collage. In the Movement gallery alone there are nods to Yves Klein, Sol Le Witt, Cildo Meireles, Cuban Santería, Haitian Vodou and ‘the Cubist fascination with African masks’. Upstairs a new commission, titled Star-Crossed Rendezvous after Yun, features more Venetian blinds accompanied by two stage lights, set to the late Korean composer and political dissident Isang Yun’s Double Concerto (1977). In the next room over, the smell of freshly laundered clothes permeates while the artist turns to her own archive for inspiration; photographs of Yang’s 2006 installation Sadong 30, which took place in her grandmother’s abandoned house, hang on the wall behind fairy lights and origami works strewn haphazardly about the floor.
In a statement, Yang describes art-making as ‘like weaving together a piece of complex, and therefore impossible to unweave, fabric’ while exhibition-making is ‘like tailoring it into something comfortable to wear’. She continues: ‘Both acts are eager attempts towards perfection. For this survey show, I deliberately unfocused my eyes to obtain the hidden 3D vision of my own practice, which is a rare, perfect occurrence like a leap year.’
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Visitors hoping to extract concrete meaning from Leap Year will be disappointed – in lieu of an overarching social or political message, Yang collects diverse objects, ideas and experiences whose meanings shift depending on context, perhaps to emphasise our commonalities. ‘It’s about cutting, layering, tearing references to create different possibilities within the world,’ says Yung Ma, the exhibition’s curator, during an opening speech. ‘Increasingly, we think about cultural identity as something that’s extremely fixed, that is historical, that doesn’t move much or change at all. But I think through the work of Haegue Yang we can actually sense and see the possibilities of that changing and shifting constantly throughout space and time.’
‘Leap Year’ runs at the Hayward Gallery, London, until 5 January 2025. For more information, visit southbankcentre.co.uk
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