Haegue Yang

Monica Blignaut
Feb 18, 2021
2 min read

Artist 295

Haegue Yang

Politics of Objects

Multi-Sensory experience

Haegue Yang (born 1971) is a South Korean artist who creates sculptural art installations out of everyday items. She is known for genre-defying, multimedia installations that interweave a range of materials and methods, historical references, and sensory experiences.

Her work ranges from paper collage to staged theatre pieces and performative sculptures, and materials. These elements are often torn, lacquered, woven, lit and hung.

Yang’s works explore the transitory nature of objects in the lived experience and can work in multiple locations.

Her works in video explore displacement and alienation in both geographical and personal terms through a combination of fiction and documentary.

Yang’s visual, sound, and olfactory installations reveal the intersections of public and private. Her sculptural installations are often complemented with sensory experiences that include scent, sound, light and tactility.

By combining industrial fabrication and local craftsmanship, Yang explores the affective power of materials in destabilizing way.

Her artistic explorations stem from material-based research exploring migration, postcolonial diasporas, enforced exile and social mobility.

As a result, the pieces she chooses link to various geopolitical contexts and histories in an attempt to understand and comment on our own time.

“My driving interests and motivations are often concrete, but my artistic language is one of abstraction. Abstraction is, for me, a way of thinking and working through collective and individual narratives across different histories, generations and locations. They coincide and overlap, becoming comprehensible on a personal level in linguistically unexplainable ways.“

Haegue Yang continues, “As artists, we have aesthetic tools, each with its particular language, to provide a distinctive form of experience. To me, a contemporary artist chooses a vocabulary to understand and articulate the politics of language and how these dominant politics address, constitute and reproduce injustices.”

‘An artistic practise should be something actual; something to experience, not necessarily to understand; and it should rather resist the conventional idea of possessing a common thread or summary in the sense of an understandable message.’ - Haegue Yang