Haegue Yang

ontheia:

Haegue Yang, Voice and Wind, 2010

HAEGUE YANG, born in 1971 in Seoul, is one of the leading artists of her generation; YANG has participated in numerous exhibitions internationally, and represented South Korea – after long consideration – at the 53rd Venice Biennial where she surprised visitors with complex installations, sculptures and videos in which their atmospheric intensity appear equally poetic and conceptual.

In her architectural interventions, and sculptures, she often employs commercially manufactured venetian blinds to explore hidden spaces that might be considered marginal, but to the artist constitute profound backdrops for understanding vulnerable sites where informal development can occur. In these works, artificial approximations of sensual experiences such as heat, light, and humidity conjure other places, other people, comfort, distress, the familiar, or perhaps something profoundly forgotten.

Ranging from industrial fan to fog machines and scent dispensers, these appliances clicked on and off at intervals, triggered by the movements of visitors, releasing faint wafts of vapour and altering the stability of the blinds as suspended barriers. Bearing no particular relation to one another, the objects appeared as an oddly animated group, connected by a sprawling system of wires giving visitors an immersive sensory experiences.