PRESENTATION: Haegue Yang-Double Soul

Rotating blinds, glowing light bulbs, rattling bells and the scent of gunpowder and wildflowers. South Korean artist Haegue Yang is known for her distinctive sculptures and large installations that engage the senses and incorporate a wide range of materials, from drying racks and turbine vents to peacock feathers, artificial plants and nylon pompoms.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: SMK Archive

Haegue Yang for her first solo exhibition in Denmark, “Double Soul”,  presents extensive selection of her enticing works featuring illumination, scent and movement to stir multiple senses. Covering her prolific artistic production from 1994-2021, the exhibition also spans a range of media: installation, sculpture, text and sound. Among the many treats in store, visitors is on presentation “Silo of Silence – Clicked Core”,  This 16-metre-tall rotating blind cylinder made of two layers offers a shimmering and silently dynamic space, when you step inside. Some of Yang’s sculptures will occasionally be activated by museum staff. The exhibition’s title refers to Yang’s preoccupation with doubling and pairing seemingly disparate dualities. In her exploration of the connections between apparent contradictions such as traditional and modern culture, industry and craft, fact and fiction, as well as the quotidian and the exceptional. Such a duality is also found in Yang’s biography, as a graduate of art schools in South Korea and Germany, and residing alternately in Seoul and Berlin. In her art, Yang addresses concerns such as a dual, multiple or non-belonging as well as isolation and community, and several of her works spring from her own sense of not fully belonging anywhere. For the exhibition Yang has created a central piece of a sculptural duo, “Sonic Intermediates – Double Soul”. The duo refers to the work and life of two groundbreaking artists, Greenlandic-Danish Pia Arke (1958–2007) and Danish Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (1911–1984) who spent most of her life in France. Yang honours their spirits and traces their life in imagining their inspiring power today. Both pioneering artists are represented in the SMK collection. Each in their own way, these two distinguished artists resonate with Yang’s hybrid artistic practice and approach with multiple affiliations, and like Yang, they had resisted being tied down to monocultural and national frameworks. One part of the duo is inspired by Ferlov Mancoba’s multi-legged sculptural creatures, while the other springs from Arke’s work critically stating the consequences of colonisation. This duo, with its intricate details, diverse references, and subjective interpretations, exemplifies Yang’s elaborate sculptural production. The video installation “Drunken Speech” (2007) entails a sleeping bag on the floor alongside a small monitor playing live TV news – Sky News, to be precise. The accompanying confessional audio (on headphones) details a woman’s attempts to become sober. Coupled with the homeless connotations of the sleeping bag and the daytime TV, the piece has a foggy sensibility similar to Yang’s other narrative works. “Non-Indépliables, nues” (2010/2020): For Yang, the drying rack is a metaphor encapsulating life as it unfolds in our day-to-day existence involving the basic activities associated with ordinary household chores: cooking, cleaning and doing laundry. Seemingly mundane objects and common appliances in our homes become expressions of complex processes that shape our lives. Many of Yang’s works focus on domestic spaces, such as the kitchen and bathroom, as well as appliances like radiators, gas stoves and laundry machines, addressing the practicalities and rituals involved in making and keeping a home. The drying rack is a practical device that is usually folded up and stored away when not in use. In setting up the drying racks, Yang transforms the humble objects into expressive figures in their own right. Many of them are pieced together to constitute distinctive poses: of piggybacking, acrobatic balancing or supporting, etc. Even though the racks look fragile and bare, they nevertheless refuse their original minor status of being folded away (the French title of the works translates to ‘non-foldable, nude’). Instead, they are now part of a sculptural alliance with luminous light bulbs mounted on long cables. The light bulb and the electric cable often appear in the so-called Light Sculptures, as evidence of the invisible flow of energy many devices are connected to. However, illumination also becomes a crucial symbol of communication and interrelations between these unremarkable objects and the larger contexts that surround them. The sculptural installation “Umbra Creatures by Rockhole” (2017-18) consists of seven sculptures, including six entitled ‘Intermediate’ and followed by individual subtitles. In this large sculptural ensemble, a range of cultural traditions and techniques, imaginative and fantastic figurations, modern synthetic materials and objects are combined to form a hybrid totality. Residing in both Korea and Germany since the mid-1990s, Yang’s life seems to traverse cultures, and she considers her works as nothing but vital manifestations of today’s complex and compelling cross-cultural experiences. While the early Intermediate series are made of natural-looking artificial straw on basic geometric frames in an obvious reference to traditional straw weaving, the Umbra Creatures employ black synthetic cords with a fetish-like shine, freeing the material from its folk connotations, and are adorned with eccentric features. This shift in method and material is characteristic of Yang’s work and acts as a way to unlearn a self-established rule.

Photo Left: Haegue Yang, A Baggy Pair in Rain – German Zucchini, 500 g and Dutch Red Onions, 1 kg, 2018. Photo: Jan Søndergaard. Right: Haegue Yang, Silo of Silence – Clicked Core, 2017. Photo: Anders Sune Berg

Info: SMK (The National Gallery of Denmark), Sølvgade 48-50, Copenhagen, Denmark, Duration: 5/3-31/7/2022, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 10:00-18:00, Wed 10:00-20:00, www.smk.dk