BOOK:Haegue Yang-In the Cone of Uncertainty, Hatje Cantz Publications
Haegue Yang’s body of work is characterized by the extraordinary diversity of its media and methods, yet at the same time, it bears a clear signature, in which the poetic and the political meld with each other. To accompany her solo show “In the Cone of Uncertainty” at The Bass Museum in Miami, a new volume featuring an extensive selection of her works from the past decade is now being released. The catalogue “In the Cone of Uncertainty” features newer and older works from the past decade. It shifts focus to the artist’s consistent curiosity about the world, and her tireless experimentation with various ways of looking at the complex, constantly changing states of the self. The exhibit contains a large selection of her works with an extended focus on her growing series of mural-like graphic wall pieces, for which Yang works with wood, paper or geometrical forms among others. It also includes installations made with window blinds—the genre that made her famous around the world. In “Red Broken Mountainous Labyrinth” and” Yearning Melancholy Red” red window blinds hang from the ceiling, creating a space both intimate and open, in which interior and exterior intermingle. A recurring motif appears again and again in Yang’s window blind works: the exploration of the relationship between the self and the Other, and the ways that the self is constituted through the gaze of the Other. “I’ve come to understand that the window blind can be a metaphor for the relationship between the self and the other, the subject and the world. How light, odors, or wind pass through them, how wide open or closed they are—something is articulated through that” says the artist about this crucial aspect of her work.-Efi Michalarou