Haegue Yang: Come Shower or Shine, It Is Equally Blissful

About the Artist
Haegue Yang (b. 1971, Seoul) has lived and worked between her native city, Seoul, and Europe, since 1994. Through abstract and complex visual languages embodied in installations, light sculptures, straw sculptures, graphics, paper collages, wallpaper, and video essays, Yang translates her subjective reflections of specific narratives, engaging various modes of materiality from industrially manufactured goods to handicraft techniques. Yang represented South Korea at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009) and exhibited at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel (2012). Her recent solo exhibitions took place at Haus der Kunst München (2012), Museum of Contemporary Art, Strasbourg (2013), Bergen Kunsthall (2013), and Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015).

From 30 October 2015 to 3 January 2016, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) is pleased to host the first solo exhibition in China of Haegue Yang. “Haegue Yang: Come Shower or Shine, It Is Equally Blissful” includes the artist’s major works from 1994 to the present with newly commissioned sculptural installations. Through the Lobby, Nave, and Central Gallery, viewers navigate the plurality of Yang’s unique visual language, a landscape of material hybridity—spices, Venetian blinds, clothing racks, synthetic straw, Choco Pies, bells, graph paper—torn, lacquered, woven, lit, and hung. Here, Yang attempts to stage diverse narratives of nameless subjectivities in a syncretic mode of abstraction and figuration that does not seek a balance between the two.

In reference to an idiom found in the poem “Drinking on the Lake when it Shines after the Rains” by the Northern Song dynasty scholar Su Shi, the exhibition’s title suggests high spirits in spite of dramatic shifts in the environment, the embrace of diversity in our world. It also alludes to the artist’s preoccupation with sensorial experience, which triggers associative sentiments beyond the verbal and conceptual. Lacquer Paintings such as Rainy Dirty (2012) or Rainy Chili (2011) display impressions of seasonal and environmental conditions acquired in the production process: lacquer is poured onto wooden panels in multiple layers then set against the elements outdoors. Exposed to rain, wind, and other disturbances, their surfaces become dotted and dusty, recording the specific season and place of their creation.

Similarly, Spice Moons (2013), eight framed panels of spice prints, line the opposite wall of the Nave, carrying the scent of Singapore’s diversity and colonial history into the exhibition space. Through visual and titular references, the two series suggest a connection between celestial bodies, the moon and stars, and human perception.

Hanging from the rafters of the Nave, Sol LeWitt Upside Down – K123456, Expanded 1078 Times, Doubled and Mirrored (2015) consists of twin volumetric shapes, tropes of LeWitt’s K123456 (1997) expanded and mirrored with Venetian blinds. Becoming opaque or transparent according to the natural light of the space or standpoint of the viewer, the piece approaches the original not as parody but as a compositionally liberated expression of respect.

Hanging from the rafters of the Nave, Sol LeWitt Upside Down – K123456, Expanded 1078 Times, Doubled and Mirrored (2015) consists of twin volumetric shapes, tropes of LeWitt’s K123456 (1997) expanded and mirrored with Venetian blinds. Becoming opaque or transparent according to the natural light of the space or standpoint of the viewer, the piece approaches the original not as parody but as a compositionally liberated expression of respect.

Totem Robots (2010), a sculptural installation in three parts titled Sidewise, Askew, and Forward, also share the Nave, their ‘arms’ and ‘heads’ draped with electric cables, light bulbs, and other ephemera emptied of function.

Totem Robots (2010), a sculptural installation in three parts titled Sidewise, Askew, and Forward, also share the Nave, their ‘arms’ and ‘heads’ draped with electric cables, light bulbs, and other ephemera emptied of function.

These accumulated anthropomorphic features can also be found in the new sculptural group The Intermediates (2015) and the wallpaper series Eclectic Totemic (2013)—completed with London-based designer duo OK-RM (Oliver Knight and Rory McGrath)—situated in the Central Gallery. Titled “The Sun and the Moon: The Golden Crow and the Jade Hare,” the floor is drawn according to a spiral pattern found in Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballett (1922), the straw figures of The Intermediates, adorned with a Korean bridal headpiece, vintage Indian cowbells, and artificial succulent plants among other things, ‘dance’ in a whimsical ritual allowing an experiential shift in their assumed objectivity.

These accumulated anthropomorphic features can also be found in the new sculptural group The Intermediates (2015) and the wallpaper series Eclectic Totemic (2013)—completed with London-based designer duo OK-RM (Oliver Knight and Rory McGrath)—situated in the Central Gallery. Titled “The Sun and the Moon: The Golden Crow and the Jade Hare,” the floor is drawn according to a spiral pattern found in Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballett (1922), the straw figures of The Intermediates, adorned with a Korean bridal headpiece, vintage Indian cowbells, and artificial succulent plants among other things, ‘dance’ in a whimsical ritual allowing an experiential shift in their assumed objectivity.