Haegue Yang's Multimedia Sensory Environments Are Focus of First U.S. Solo Museum Exhibition at Walker Art Center

Recent work by Berlin/Seoul-based artist Haegue Yang, including photographs, works on paper, video, slide projection, sculpture, and installation, will be showcased in her first U.S. solo museum exhibition—

Haegue Yang: Integrity of the Insider

—presented by the Walker Art Center September 24 (5–9 pm)–February 28. Increasingly receiving wider recognition, Yang’s work was included in the 55th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2008), and the 2008 Turin Triennale. In addition, she is the first woman artist to represent the Republic of Korea at this year’s 53rd Venice Biennale.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Yang will be in residence at the Walker in September and October to act as both apprentice and leader in a series of seminars and workshops that address the diverse subjects that have informed her work. In February 2010, multidisciplinary public programs resulting from the shared learning experience will coincide with the close of the exhibition.

Poetry, politics, and human emotion inform Haegue Yang’s practice—and its relationship to the everyday. Over the past few years, working with nontraditional materials such as customized venetian blinds and electrical devices, she has created a series of carefully orchestrated installations that operate as microcosms of sensory experiences and are the results of her ongoing engagement with certain historical figures of interest. Yearning Melancholy Red (2008), the centerpiece of her Walker exhibition, arose from the artist’s exploration of the life of Marguerite Duras, the late French writer and filmmaker. The exhibition, which surveys the artist’s practice from the past few years, also includes smaller-scale pieces that illuminate the larger installation.

Haegue Yang’s work was first shown at the Walker as part of the 2007 exhibition Brave New Worlds, a global group show featuring 24 artists from 17 countries. Her large-scale mixed-media installation Series of Vulnerable Arrangements—Blind Room (2006/2007), which premiered at the 2006 São Paulo Biennale before its presentation at the Walker, represented a significant turning point in her practice. Part of the Walker’s collection, Blind Room is a meticulously choreographed series of perceptual experiences.

In London, Frankfurt, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Bilbao, and other cities, Yang has produced and presented a dizzying sequence of increasingly complex installations. It’s as if she wishes to make the viewer’s perceptual experience—initially fleeting, almost shy—increasingly more involved and participatory. In Yearning Melancholy Red (2008), co-produced by REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater), Los Angeles, and the Walker and premiered at REDCAT in June 2008, custom-made white and faux wood blinds radiate from central structures like fans or flowers. The drama is heightened by roving theater lights throughout the space whose movements are connected, via a control board, to a drum set that visitors are invited to play.

“Abstraction is the language I choose to give true value to the presence of narrative inside of me as well as the narratives I have encountered and realized as ‘relatives,’ which exist outside of me,” says Yang. “I think what fundamentally lies beneath these narratives can be shared without being told as a story. For me, abstraction is not anti-narrative, it is not a language that attempts to negate narration but rather allows a narrative to be achieved without constituting its own limits. The form of language I choose to experiment with is abstract even if the motivation is always concrete.”

Also on view at the Walker will be several works exploring what the artist calls “folding, unfolding, non-folding,” an important concept, which refers to the physical act of making and unmaking geometry, as in origami, while also intimating potentially mutable states of forms, ideas, and emotions. These include Gymnastics of the Foldables (2006), a humorous series of photographs of a clothes-drying rack doing a calisthenic exercise; and Non-Foldings (2007), stenciled silhouettes of (sometimes flattened) origami polyhedrons on large pieces of paper.

The exhibition will also feature Dehors (2006)—the French word for “outside”—a slide projection of fanciful real-estate advertisements collected from Korean newspapers. With their seductive text blocked out, sequential images of architectural renderings conjure a dream of a futuristic, spectacular, and ultimately unattainable life. This subtle critique of the gap between representation and the viewer’s (in)capacity for identification are present in a different way in another work, Quasi MB—in the middle of its story (2006/2007). A group of photographs, typed texts, and smudged handwriting, the work is Yang’s imaginary, one-way conversation with the late Belgian poet, filmmaker, and conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924–1976). It is also a kind of confession in which Yang reveals both her admiration for this influential artistic predecessor and the ultimately unbridgeable distance she senses between the revered Western artist and herself, a stranger in a foreign land.

Born in 1971 in Seoul, Korea, Haegue Yang received degrees from the Seoul National University and the Städelschule in Frankfurt-am-Main. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at Sala Rekalde, Bilbao; REDCAT, Los Angeles; and Portikus, Frankfurt.

Artist-in-Residence Seminars and Workshops

In conjunction with her solo exhibition, Haegue Yang will be in residence at the Walker in September and October to embark on a Shared Discovery of What We Have and Know Already, a pedagogical experiment featuring seminars and workshops with members of the Walker staff, the local community, and international guests. The participants—simultaneously teachers and learners—will form an “audience-in-residence” that will have opportunities to explore aspects of the Walker not normally accessible to the public. A series of multidisciplinary public programs resulting from this shared learning experience will be presented in February 2010 to coincide with the close of the exhibition.

Exhibition Curator

Haegue Yang: Integrity of the Insider is curated by Doryun Chong, Associate Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, with Walker curatorial fellow Andria Hickey. Formerly associate curator of visual arts at the Walker Art Center, Chong organized Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis (2008–2009), the artist’s first solo exhibition outside of Europe and Japan and the first comprehensive showing of his work in more than a decade. In addition, he organized Brave New Worlds (2007), with Yasmil Raymond; Catherine Sullivan: Triangle of Need (2007); and OPEN–ENDED (the art of engagement) (2006). With former Walker chief curator and deputy director Philippe Vergne, he curated House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective (2005–2006), the first mid-career survey of the Paris-based artist.

RELATED EVENTS

Target Free Thursday Nights

Thursday, September 24

Opening-Day Artist Talk: Haegue Yang, 7 pm

Cinema
Free tickets available at the Bazinet Garden Lobby desk from 6 pm

In conversation with curator Doryun Chong, the artist discusses her process, which incorporates intensive research in philosophy and history, and examines ways in which these subjects and her own highly personal narratives become a part of her work.

Thursday, October 1

Sound Bites: Short Talks About Art
Haegue Yang’s Installations, 6:30 and 7 pm

Meet in the Bazinet Garden Lobby

Get connected to new and exciting ideas. Join a Walker tour guide for a brief insider’s view of Haegue Yang’s all-encompassing installation pieces.

Thursday, October 22

Sound Bites: Short Talks About Art
Haegue Yang’s Quasi MB, 6:30 and 7 pm

Meet in the Bazinet Garden Lobby

Get connected to new and exciting ideas. Join a Walker tour guide for a brief insider’s view of Haegue Yang’s Quasi MB, the artist’s imaginary, one-way conversation—via photographs, typed texts, and smudged handwriting—with the late Belgian poet, filmmaker, and conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924–1976).

Thursday, November 12

Sound Bites: Short Talks About Art
Haegue Yang’s Yearning Melancholy Red, 6:30 and 7 pm

Meet in the Bazinet Garden Lobby

Get connected to new and exciting ideas. Join a Walker tour guide for a brief insider’s view of Haegue Yang’s meticulously choreographed sensory environment.

Target Free Thursday Nights sponsored by Target.

Arty Pants: Your Tuesday Playdate

Arty Pants: Your Tuesday Playdate

Tuesdays, October 13 and 27, 11 am–1 pm
For kids ages 3–5 and adults
Free with gallery admission; Walker members and kids ages 12 and under are always free

What do hip kids and their (possibly) cooler parents do to spark creativity? Inspired by artist Haegue Yang, participants will discover the many ways that contemporary art appeals to the senses. Experience stories, films, and artmaking through touching, hearing, seeing, smelling, and tasting.

Film: Apple directed by Jonas Rudström

US Bank Orientation Lounge
In this Swedish short a young boy covets a beautiful apple growing on a nearby tree in the yard of the most dangerous man in the neighborhood.

Art-Making Activities

Star Tribune Foundation Art Lab
Get swept away with art-making that engages a variety of senses.

October 13: Smells Like Art
October 27: Sounds Like Art

Story Time: A Penguin Story by Antoinette Portis

Cargill Lounge
The world becomes filled with new possibilities when Edna stumbles across a color she’s never experienced before.

Gallery Activity: Scavenger Hunt

Seek out works on view and match them up with items that appeal to your tot’s senses.

As part of the Walker Art Center’s Raising Creative Kids Initiative, Arty Pants: Your Tuesday Playdate is made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Gallery Tours

Friday, October 2, 2 pm
Thursday, October 8, 2 pm
Saturday, October 17, 2 pm
Sunday, October 25, 2 pm
Thursday, November 12, 2 pm
Saturday, November 21, 2 pm
Sunday, November 22, 2 pm
Friday, December 11, 2 pm
Sunday, December 13, 2 pm

Gallery Admission, Hours

$10 adults; $8 seniors (65+); $6 students/teens (with ID)
Free to Walker members and children ages 12 and under.
Free with a paid ticket to a same-day Walker event.
Free to all every Thursday evening (5–9 pm) and on the first Saturday of each month (10 am–5 pm).

Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday 11 am–5 pm
Thursday 11 am–9 pm
Closed Mondays