ART CITIES:Montpellier-Haegue Yang
In her work, Haegue Yang seeks to communicate without language, in a primordial and visual way. She often complements her vocabulary of visual abstraction with sensory experiences that include scent, sound, light and tactility. Combining industrial fabrication and folk craftsmanship, Yang explores the affective power of materials in destabilizing the distinction between the modern and pre-modern.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: La Panacée–MoCo Archive
Haegue Yang in her solo exhibition ”Chronotopic traverses”, at La Panacée – MoCo, brings together unexpected arrangements of new and existing works in an immersive and hybrid environment, intertwining organic and artificial elements to move across time and space.Traversing a wide range of media, from collage to performance, Haegue 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, 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. Populated by creature-like sculptures, the inhabited landscape of “Chronotopic traverses” unfolds across three rooms at La Panacée-MoCo, with a wallpaper, Incubation and Exhaustion (2018, in collaboration with Manuel Raeder) rendering the entire wall surface of the space. This hybrid and panoramic environment is a result of Yang’s initial investigation of Occitan culture and local industries as well as her long-lasting interest in pagan culture and the notion of folk. On the first room, three newly-created sculptures are on view: “The Intermediate-Dangling Hairy Hug” (2018), “The Intermediate-Dragged Hairy Hug” (2018), and “Sonic Rampant Obscure Turbine Vents, Double Decker-Bushy Feet” (2018). The ensemble’s almost fetish aspect of blackness dominates, in contrast to the bright background of wallpaper with numerous garlic and onions. The second room presents two groups of sculptures, “Macramé Sculptures” and “Sonic Moons”. The surfaces of three suspended. “Sonic Half Moons” are covered by brass and silver plated bells, arranged to divide the spheres into different sectors, with tentacle-like long bell chains hanging down all the way to the floor. Acting as lunar objects, they seem to animate the space with their choreography of tentacles when set in motion by manually twisting the spheres. They are accompanied by three craft-based “Macramé Sculptures” displayed on clothing racks, collectively titled Knotty Spells. The labor-intensive production of knotting is central for this sculptural series on casters, ornamented by diverse decorative objects, such as bells, dried tropical exotic fruits or seed pods, as well as vintage jewelry from Morocco. Finally, the third space presents two sculptures, “The Intermediate – Running Squeezed Two-tone Fan Dance” (2016) and “The Intermediate – Occitanian Vagabond” (2018). Created as part of the series of sculptures titled The Intermediates, which employ weaving or planting of synthetic straw as the primary method, the materials and arrangements of each sculpture evoke different dynamics and references. The whirling formation as well as patchy textiles refer to a figuration of pagan or folk rituals to ward off evil spirits by leaning on a projection of supernatural power, as commonly observed across various cultural topologies. Haegue Yang’s works straddle seemingly opposing artistic legacies and aesthetics, between conceptual art strategies and materially-driven craft techniques, industrial production and the handmade, and importantly for this exhibition, between figuration and abstraction. Yang’s work undoes these supposed binaries and creates immersive and imaginative experiences.
Info: LA PANACÉE – MoCo (Montpellier Contemporain), Centre D’Art Contemporain, 14 rue de l’Ecole de Pharmacie, Montpellier, Duration: 13/10/18-13/1/19, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 12:00-20:00, Sun 10:00-18:00, https://lapanacee.org
