PRESENTATION: Haegue Yang-Flat Works

One of the most important artists working today, Yang is predominantly known as a sculptor and installation artist. Nonetheless, her two-dimensional investigations have been consistent and essential to her creative development. A fundamental recognition of these series is that “flatness” registers a collapse of the three-dimensional world as image. The aesthetics of these investigations range from minimalist and discrete to maximalist and engulfing.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: The Arts Club of Chicago

The exhibition “Flat Works” marks Haegue Yang’s first North American retrospective to survey the artist’s two-dimensional explorations over the last three decades. Through a select number of key works, the ambitious exhibition identifies underlying connections and motivations across the artist’s oeuvre, offering a scholarly perspective on this aspect of Yang’s career for the first time. “Haegue Yang: Flat Works” includes 58 works from seven series: “Hardware Store Collages”, “Lacquer Paintings”, “Non-Foldings”, “Trustworthies” (abstractions made from security envelopes and other materials), “Wallpapers”, “Edibles”, and most recently, “Mesmerizing Mesh” (cut and folded paper collages based on varied, international shamanistic practices). These diverse investigations have accompanied Yang’s practice in three dimensions—including her iconic venetian blind installations and remarkable sonic sculptures with metallic bells—and have been presented in all of her major exhibitions. Until now, however, they have never been comprehensively explored on their own. Pointing to the cumulative impact of these two-dimensional works, this exhibition unearths through-lines across Yang’s many diverse projects. Formed around the key word “flat,” it provides a rich but rare insight into Yang’s conceptual map. Yang’s revelatory exploration of “flat” projects is still evolving—and the exhibition at The Arts Club of Chicago offers both landmark and recent materials that attest to this process. Yang hangs an excerpt from a room-scaled wallpaper on the vitrine surrounding The Arts Club of Chicago’s classic Mies van der Rohe staircase, while an elaborate wooden trellis is newly conceived to display collages from the “Mesmerizing Mesh” series with related archival research undertaken by the artist. Both the vitrine and the trellis show the evolving energy of Yang’s creative practice by compressing or exploding the space of the exhibition, which produces a sense of dimensional shift. Yang’s engagement with paper collage techniques has become recognized through the production of series, such as “Trustworthies” (since 2010) and “Hardware Store Collages” (since 2012). “Mesmerizing Mesh” (since 2021) however, builds its central idea onto counter-authoritarian spiritual orientations such as shamanism. While her research has been extensive, her production deliberately circles around the materiality of paper. “Hanj”i or similar mulberry paper can be found in various artistic as well as ritualistic traditions in places like Korea, Japan, and China. For her initial production of “Mesmerizing Mesh”, Yang has focused on motifs and objects in shamanism, Shinto, and folk rituals used to create objects reserved for purifying, healing, and exorcizing rites. The “Mesmerizing Mesh” works take different forms. Some deal with the process of “formation” and are composed of geometric and abstract patterns unfolding and spreading out from the center. They reference “sumun”, a sheet hung from the ceiling in rituals sites to keep away evil spirits. Others represent figurative and almost anthropomorphic motifs. They resemble soul sheets (nukjeon), in which the shaman blows a spirit treated as the identical entity of the deceased being honored. Of late, the collages have been displayed against hand-dyed multicolored backdrops and also gradually combined with vegetal or animal motifs drawing from the Slavic tradition of “wycinanki”. By folding, cutting, and perforating hanji, Yang examines a methodology shared between artists and shamans of taking “mystic leaps” out of earthly matter into something beyond.

Photo: Haegue Yang, Incantations – Entwinement, Endurance and Extinction 2022, Digital color print on self-adhesive vinyl film, paper pinwheels Dimensions variable, Courtesy of the artist

Info: Curators: Janine Mileaf and Kimberly Querry, The Arts Club of Chicago, 201 E. Ontario Street, Chicago, IL, USA, Duration: 18/9-20/12/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-15:00, www.artsclubchicago.org/