PRESENTATION: Haegue Yang-Several Reenactments

Haegue Yang has been negotiating and traversing boundaries (between different geographies, historical eras, and artistic styles) throughout her career. Yang creates materially rich works and compositionally specific installations and arrangements for each exhibition. Her refined yet singular vision of materiality, combined with an elegant sense of space and atmosphere, has contributed to the development of enveloping and resonant installations. Distinguished by its formal agility and capacity to convey a wide range of ideas, histories, perceptions, and emotions.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: S.M.A.K. Archive

“Several Reenactments” is Haegue Yang’s first solo exhibition in a Belgian museum and pivots on notions of recurrence, reflecting the artist’s lasting preoccupation with doubling, mirroring, and reiterating. In this exhibition, Yang seeks out the obscure, mysterious, and yet inherently intense qualities of repetition in her work. A process of continuous circling creates a strong intercontextuality in her practice, to the extent that her works often appear as pairs or interconnected groups. “The Source of Spring is in the Trace of a Movement” (2021) is the first artwork that one encounters in Yang’s solo exhibition. This screen-printed edition on paper is an adaptation of the inscription on the historical marquetry of the South London Gallery’s floor, designed by artist, book illustrator, and socialist activist Walter Crane (1845-1915). Yang has borrowed Crane’s inscription “The Source of Art is in the Life of a People”, which refers to the idea that art should be available to all and not just the privileged few, just as the gallery should be accessible to the overlooked working-class then living in South London. In her print edition, Crane’s profound artistic commitment to the people is reenacted in support of the recent mass pro-democracy protests in Myanmar. The original Victorian vegetal and floral ornamentation is partially replaced by healing plants native to the Southeast Asian country. Nestling amongst them is a three-fin-ger salute that alludes not only to the people of Myanmar’s hunger for democracy but also to our own socio-political empathy for their plight.  The central work of the exhibition is “Warrior Believer Lover – Version Sonic” (2023) this is a new, yet incomplete reenactment of Warrior Believer Lover, an installation of thirty-three “Light” Sculptures that was shown in the exhibition Arrivals at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2011. The Ghent commission is comprised of only seventeen sculptures that bear some common elements to their predecessors, yet differ in their smaller bodies, which are covered with metallic bells, currently regarded as one of Yang’s signature materials. The panoramic sculptural field at S.M.A.K. is a daring attempt to portray non-conformist archetypes: the warrior (fighting intensely for something), the believer (who lives life with absolute faith), and the lover (courageously revealing oneself to another). Echoing Yang’s desire to honour these uncompromising qualities, all of which are underpinned by a profound sense of dedication, the new sculptures are tributes to figures who never deviate from their personal values. Like the work that preceded it, Warrior Believer Lover – Version Sonic is also divided into recognisable individual sculptures and groups of two, three, or six. Each cluster has a distinctive title, including “Sonic Female Natives”, “Sonic Medicine Men”, “Sonic Totem Robots”, “Sonic Pine Spells”, and “Sonic Stone Dance”. The installation is made from a vast array of artisanal and industrially manufactured objects, arranged rigorously, lending the work a remarkable complexity like a composition of an orchestral work or a dance piece. Adorned with artificial plants, wigs and solar lamps, the sculptures resemble small anthropomorphic figures, each of which boasts a unique personality and history. They explore the limits of nature and artifice, as well as totemic and ritualistic movement.

 In “Quasi-Yves Klein Blue, Wall paint 3” Yang further breaks down the monumentality of the Central Gallery through a radical gesture: it has been painted in a bright, mono-chrome blue. Quasi-Yves Klein Blue provides not only a lush visual effect, but also inserts a nuanced and subtle conceptual narrative through its monochrome coloring. Following the artist’s specifications, the S.M.A.K. team selected several blues available at their local paint supplier and voted on the one that most closely matched International Klein Blue, or IKB, the cobalt hue licensed by the French artist Yves Klein. Yang refers to the chosen colour as Quasi-Yves Klein Blue. In this way, she alludes to the notion of patented authority and the Western canon. The staff voting process and the quasi-empirical survey – both absurd and precarious – contests Klein’s individualistic legacy to offer a more collective set of relations between artists, museum professionals, and the history of art. Complicating notions of originality, “quasi” is an artistic strategy that relativises the Western canon, turning it “upside down” so to speak. Yang’s layers of citation, expansion, and overturning at once both oppose and honour the art historical narratives the West has long taken for granted. For Yang, ‘quasi’ – meaning something almost like the original, yet not quite – is a recurrent question that touches upon notions of originality and alleged authorisation.  “A Sonic Guard” (2022) is spread loosely on the floor of each Cabinet Gallery. Emerging like transparent woven fabrics, the nets of bells cover a range of objects. Items from Korean ceremonial table settings are arranged beneath “Sonic Guard over Ceremonial Formation – Blue” (2022). To this day, many Koreans perform ancestral rites on chuseok (a lunar mid-autumn harvest festival) and seollal (a lunar new year) and on the anniversary of an ancestor’s death. Sonic Guard over Domestic Formation – Crimson covers, and thus guards, various common yet old-fashioned food containers found in many Korean households. With the selected objects underneath the Sonic Guards, Yang draws our attention to the interconnected aspects of the world and life, the secular and sacred or quotidian and ritualistic. Yang has devoted herself to the development of the “Sonic” Sculptures since 2013 by focusing on the use of bells as a primary material, and various works have developed out of that engagement. While most of them have a hard metallic frame with mesh underneath to attach the bells, Yang has become increasingly interested in sculptures whose shapes are malleable. The “Sonic Ropes”, “Sonic Droplets”, and “Sonic Guards” are sculptures whose flexible bodies allow the bells to determine the form of the sculptures themselves. Yet unlike the other two, the Sonic Guards are silent. Their stillness enables us to contemplate the works’ shapes, colors, and textures. Another noticeable aspect is the weight, apparent in the way the bells lie on top of the objects, whose outlines bulge through. “Doubles and Halves” (2009) was first shown in Yang’s solo presentation for the Korean Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale. This video essay was filmed in two distinct locations: Ahyeon-dong, a neighborhood in Seoul where the artist was then living, and Venice, more specifically the hidden spaces around the Korean Pavilion in Giardini Park, the site of the annual international art or architecture biennale. While half of Ahyeon-dong was in the process of leaving due to new developments, unfolding a spooky state between total emptiness and the normal mode of inhabitation, the corners around the Korean Pavilion in Giardini Park showed off their full off-seasonal melancholy. Yet each place resembles the other since both were shot with insufficient light, either at sunset or sunrise. Because the audio track and the video with its own ambient sound differ in length, they loop unsynchronized and their combination varies. The places shown in the video and the people described by the voice pass by one another endlessly, continuing to meet only furtively and without explanation. The voice on the audio track utters a soliloquy about name-less neighbours who never meet and two places that never overlap. Imagining the nonexistent community between the secret neigh-bours, the voice narrates the unconditional interdependence, faith, and generosity between these individuals through the metaphor of condensation, which was the exhibition title at the artwork’s premiere in the Venice Biennale.

Photo: Haegue Yang, Sonic Female Natives, 2023 (detail), Powder-coated steel frame, powder-coated mesh, ball bearings, casters, stainless steel bells, PVD-coated stainless steel bells, split rings, artificial plants, dried ginger, dried tree-ear mushroom, pine cones, floral tapes, wires, brooms, nylon cord, rope, scrubbing brush. Courtesy of the artist, Photo: Studio Haegue Yang

Info: S.M.A.K., Jan Hoetplein 1, Ghent, Belgium, Duration: 22/4-10/9/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 9:30-17:30, Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, https://smak.be/