Thursday Night: Haegue Yang

Haegue Yang had a difficult time producing art that had a narrative, yet she could never achieve going full abstract.  Haegue liked the thought of being committed to repeat without the intent of actually achieving something.  Her art practice was neither a job or a career, it was more of what she would make it to herself and how she could practice it.  The processes of each art piece are meaningful to her.  In one of her pieces, that was installed over abandoned train tracks, where only products arrived in, the blinds in this piece came down as if something were entering and the blinds came up to show the emptiness.  The blinds synchronized and would come down and up at random times to emphasize a ghostly presence in a lonely space.  When making this piece, she was interested in the ghost dance of industrialization.  Another one of Haegue Yang's main works, Series of Vulnerable Arrangements—Voice and Wind (2009), draws out shadows of places and experiences that are not physically there. The Electric fans and scents function as sensorial stimuli, filling the space with a variety of subtle, differing sensational experiences that call upon the visitor’s or visitors subjectivity; this experience serves as a key element in the meaning of the work. The system of manufactured blinds function as decorations for the home that emphasize the ugliness of the private sphere.  Voice and Wind relies on natural light and brings out the modest, mundane, non-public influence of the domestic space, a recurring concept in Yang’s works.  Haegue Yang’s work in general is marked by a particular preoccupation with the coexistence of formalism and emotion, determination and improvisation. Haegue often incorporates manufactured blinds in her meditative installations, architectural interventions, and sculpture as a kind of a flawed spatial boundary; a disruption of sight lines and movement that is easily transgressable visually, aurally, and physically. In these works, electricity operates as an invisible connection between objects, people, and ideas; it is a source of a variety of sensual experiences such as heat, light, and humidity that bring out other places, other people, familiar sensations, or something that has been greatly forgotten.