Haegue Yang

Name
Haegue Yang
Date of birth
1971
Place of birth
Seoul/Republic of Korea
Gender
Female
Biography
Haegue Yang was born in 1971 in Seoul, South Korea, and received her BFA from Seoul National University. In the late 1990s, she moved to Germany, where she earned an MFA from the Städelschule Frankfurt am Main.
[From https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/haegue-yang]
Traversing a wide range of media, from collage to performance, Yang’s body of work often features quotidian and domestic found objects ranging from tea cozies to cans of Spam. The artist dissociates such materials from their original contexts, rearranging them into abstract compositions that build upon a unique and personal visual vocabulary. By including perceptual effects generated with the help of heaters, electrical fans, and even scent diffusers,
07th June 2022
Sarah Farrar
27th May 2022
3
Yang frequently stages multisensory environments, which—together with the mundane objects—become meditations on labor, emotional connection, and dislocation, replete with references to various moments of abstraction throughout art history.
Recognizable motifs recur throughout Yang’s oeuvre, including Venetian blinds; the artist’s first work to feature the slats was Series of Vulnerable Arrangements—Blind Room, which made its debut in 2006 at the São Paulo Biennial. Yang’s series of blinds, arranged into offset planes and set on casters, later appeared at The Tanks at Tate Modern in 2012; these pieces also featured performers who rolled around and interacted with the sculptures in a reference to the choreography in Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer’s modernist Triadisches Ballett (1922). In interviews, Yang has discussed the concept of “permeability to perception” offered by Venetian blinds, which have also appeared as elements of her installations at Documenta (2012) and the Venice Biennale (2009).
Before Yang came to prominence internationally, she received recognition as the recipient of the 2005 Cremer Prize and the Baloise Prize in 2007. Her breakthrough was in 2009 when she represented South Korea at the 53rd Venice Biennale, where she was also the first female artist to represent the country. Since then, her works have been exhibited internationally, including dOCUMENTA 13 (2012), the 8th Gwangju Biennale (2010) and the 9th Taipei Biennial (2014). Yang has also been shown in solo and group exhibitions at institutions such as Haus der Kunst, Munich (2012–13) and Bergen Kunsthall (2013).