ART-PRESENTATION: Haegue Yang-In the Cone of Uncertainty
Haegue Yang’s ongoing research is empowered by underlying references to art history, literature, and political history, through which she re-interprets some of her recurrent themes: migration, postcolonial diasporas, enforced exile, and social mobility. As a result, her works link various geopolitical contexts and histories in an attempt to understand and comment on our own time. Yang’s translation from the political and historical into the formal and abstract demonstrates her conviction that historical narratives can be made comprehensible without being linguistically explanatory or didactic.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: The Bass Museum Archive
The exhibition “In the Cone of Uncertainty” in Bass Museum presents a selection of Haegue Yang’s oeuvre spanning the last decade: including window blind installations, anthropomorphic sculptures, light sculptures, and mural-like graphic wallpaper – taking its title from an expression of the South Florida vernacular, that describes the predicted path of hurricanes. Alluding to our eagerness and desperation to track the unstable and ever-evolving future, this exhibition addresses current anxieties about climate change, overpopulation and resource scarcity. Framing this discourse within a broader consideration of movement, displacement and migration, the exhibition contextualizes contemporary concerns through a trans-historical and philosophical meditation of the self. According to the United States Census Bureau over the 50% of the population in Miami-Dade County is born outside of the United States, and it is a geographical and metaphorical gateway to Latin America. Yang has been commissioned by Bass museum to conceive a site-specific wallpaper in the staircase that connects the exhibition spaces across The Bass’ two floors. This wallpaper is applied to both transparent and opaque surfaces to accompany the ascending and descending path of visitors within the exhibition. Informed by research about Miami Beach’s climatically-precarious setting, the wallpaper, titled “Coordinates of Speculative Solidarity” (2019), plays with meteorological infographics and diagrams as vehicles for abstraction. Interested in how severe weather creates unusual access to negotiations of belonging and community, as well as the human urge to predict catastrophic circumstances, the work reflects a geographic commonality that unconsciously binds people together through a shared determination to face a challenge and react in solidarity. Yang’s exhibition exemplifies an array of Yang’s formally, conceptually ambitious and rigorous body of work. Considered an important “Light Sculpture” work and one of the last made in the series, “Strange Fruit” (2012-13) occupies one of the first spaces in the exhibition. The group of anthropomorphic sculptures take their title from Jewish-American Abel Meeropol’s poem famously vocalized by Billie Holiday in 1939. Hanging string lights dangling from metal clothing racks intertwined with colorfully painted papier-mâché bowls and hands that hold plants resonate with the poem’s subject matter. Central to the ehibition is the daring juxtaposition of two major large-scale installations made of venetian blinds. “Yearning Melancholy Red” and “Red Broken Mountainous Labyrinth” are similar in that they are both from 2008, a year of significant development for Yang, and their use of the color red: one consists of red blinds, while the other features white blinds colored by red light. With its labyrinthine structure, “Red Broken Mountainous Labyrinth” bears a story of the chance encounter between Korean revolutionary Kim San and American journalist Nym Wales, without which a chapter of Korean history would not survive to this day. “Yearning Melancholy Red” references the seemingly apolitical childhood of French writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras. While living in French Indochina Duras and her family experienced a type of double isolation in material and moral poverty, by neither belonging to the native communities nor to the French colonizers, embodying the potentiality for her later political engagement. A third space of the exhibition features work from Yang’s signature “Sonic Sculpture” series titled, “Boxing Ballet” (2013-15). The work offers Yang’s translation of Oskar Schlemmmer’s “Triadic Ballet” (1922), transforming the historical lineage of time-based performance into spatial, sculptural and sensorial abstraction. Through elements of movement and sound, Yang develops an installation with a relationship to the Western Avant-Garde, investigating their understanding in the human body, movement and figuration.
Info: Silvia Karman Cubiñá, The Bass Museum, 2100 Collins AveNUE, Miami Beach, Duration: 2/11/19-5/4/20, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 10:00-17:00, https://thebass.org
