Venue : Köln, Germany, Ludwig Museum

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《ETA 1994 – 2018》 Poster ⒸMuseum Ludwig

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Haegue Yang, 〈Mountains of Encounter〉, 2008. aluminium venetian blinds, powder-coated hanging structure, steel wire rope, moving spotlights, floodlights, platform ladder, cable, dimensions variable. Joint acquisition by the Gesellschaft fur Moderne Kunst and the Museum Ludwig on the occasion of the 2018 Wolfgang Hahn Prize Installation view, Wessen Geschichte (Whose (His)Story), Kunstverein in Hamburg, 2008. © Haegue Yang, photoⓒFred Dott, Hamburg, Image provided by Kukje Gallery

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In the first ever comprehensive survey exhibition on the artist Haegue Yang, the Museum Ludwig is showcasing the full spectrum of her oeuvre, from early objects made during her time as a student to current works. The acronym ETA stands for 《Estimated Time of Arrival》, a phrase that one often encounters in public transit and navigation devices. Yang is constantly on the move: she commutes between her studios in Berlin and Seoul, has exhibited internationally since 1994, and her travels provide important impulses for her works. by the day of 12th AUG.

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Curator: Yilmaz Dziewior
Curatorial Project Management: Leonie Radine

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Series of Vulnerable Arrangements – Version Utrecht

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〈Series of Vulnerable Arrangements – Seven Basel Lights〉, 2007. 7 pieces, various materials, dimensions variable, Hamburger Kunsthalle, gift of Baloise-Versicherungsgruppe, 2007 Installation view of Seven Basel Lights, Art 38 Basel, Art Statements with Galerie Barbara Wien, Beriln, Photo Ⓒ Photographic Servies, Basel, Image provided by Kukje Gallery

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The exhibition begins not chronologically but with her 2006 installation 〈Series of Vulnerable Arrangements – Version Utrecht〉, which appeals to our senses in multiple ways: a gentle breeze blows through the room, two scents spread out, heat and humidity are palpable. Surrounded by venetian blinds, three video essays entitled Video Trilogy showcase Yang’s travels through various cities in Europe, South Korea, and Brazil. The soundtrack features personal comments by the artist, which were later recorded using other people’s voices.

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The introductory installation brings together topics that are central to Yang’s work. These touch on contradictory and multi-sensory experiences entailed by frequent changes of location: feelings of rootlessness, a desire to move on, and the longing for an arrival,while also rejecting the state of being settled: "Up until now, the places I have lived in were rather a moderate mixture of chance and fate than an intended choice made out of necessity. Of course, sometimes I did make some choices. But looking back, those decisions were not always my own. They seemed like a trap set up by circumstances and situations. At the same time, these places are an object of strong emotions like enthusiasm, compassion, and such. Moreover, according to the surroundings, one’s state of mind and approach to living could vary."

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Storage Piece

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〈Storage Piece〉, 2004. Wrapped and stacked art works, Euro pallets, audio player, speakers, dimensions variable, Haubrok Collection, Berlin, Installation view, Alterity Display, Lawrence O’Hana Gallery, 2004 ⒸHaegue Yang, Image provided by Kukje Gallery

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In 2004, Haegue Yang was invited to exhibit in a London gallery. Since there were neither enough financial resources to store older works nor to create new ones, she developed one of her most radical works out of necessity: she stacked her packed works on pallets and exhibited them under the title Storage Piece.
The installation, which went unsold in the London exhibition, was acquired one year later at Art Forum in Berlin by a private collection for Conceptual Art.

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Storage Piece symbolically poses questions that many artists face: How does one position oneself within the complex art system, and how can one face high expectations, one’s own convictions, and the rules of the market? In addition, it potentially functions as a small survey exhibition in its own right, especially when, as at the Museum Ludwig, some of the works are gradually unpacked.

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〈Sink with Wire〉, 1995/2017. plaster, wood, steel wire, text on foils, 57x73x49cm ⒸHaegue Yang, photoⒸStudio Haegue Yang, Image provided by Kukje Gallery

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The display cases in the first side gallery present early works from the 1990s, when Haegue Yang studied under Georg Herold at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Her teacher’s preference for simple materials and suggestive plays on words can be recognized in these works, as can a confrontation with the European avant-garde, Arte Povera, Fluxus, and the then popular Context Art. Plaster elements, glass containers, noodles, and paper products seem like remnants of Happenings with backgrounds one can only speculate on. With labels such as “IKEA Cup as a Self-Portrait” and “Long Life/Bad Life,” the objects seem to be the results of an absurd research experiment conducted on the human species. At the same time, the artist undertakes an ironic form of self-archiving with supposedly self-referential objects that are culturally and historically loaded.

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Series of Vulnerable Arrangements – Seven Basel Lights And Medicine Men

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〈Medicine Man – Indiscreet Other World〉 from the series Medicine Men 2010. Clothing rack, casters, light bulbs, cable, zip ties, terminal strips, nylon cord, knitting yarn, wigs, papier-mache, watercolor, varnish, metal rings, metal chains, Myler tinsel, aluminum reflector, fringe, 180x120x100cm. Zabludowicz Collection, London ⒸHaegue Yang, PhotoⒸNick Ash, Image provided by Kukje Gallery

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With Haegue Yang’s Series of Vulnerable Arrangements – Seven Basel Lights, we encounter a small army of unusual creatures that evoke contradictory associations: these light sculptures seem original, extraterrestrial, almost menacingly bold yet vulnerably fragile. Their main components of IV stands, electrical lighting elements, and cables take on an idiosyncratic and unique atmosphere with the addition of multicolored nets, ropes, and tinsel. The individual titles open up a wide range of references: Moderato Cantabile means “moderately songlike” and is also the title of a book by Marguerite Duras, Drip Drawing recalls Jackson Pollock’s technique of action painting, and Drag Queen shakes up conservative notions of gender roles. Other titles, such as Colorful Leftover and Warm Melancholy, appeal to our senses and imagination.

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Yang’s series Medicine Men seems like a guard of animal figures dancing around the room. The wigs lend them both a shamanic and a carnivalesque effect. Titles like Hairy Mad Joint and Indiscreet Other World expand the range of associations.
In this way, the sober clothing and product racks are altered and exoticized−a transformation that can be applied to art itself: to what degree are artists exoticized in other people’s eyes, or to what degree can they draw strength from the act of (subversive) self-exoticization?

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VIP’S UNION PETITE

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〈VIP ́s Union〉, 2001. Tables and chairs, dimensions variable, commissioned by Art Forum Berlin, ⒸHaegue Yang, PhotoⒸJoanneum/ N. Lackner/Universal museum Joanneum

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For the Cologne version of VIP’s Union, different pieces of furniture were borrowed from prominent local figures from the fields of culture, politics, business, education, labor, social work, media, entertainment, and sports. Among others, Cologne mayor Henriette Reker, musician Wolfgang Niedecken, comedian Hella von Sinnen, and football player Lukas Podolski were asked if they would be willing to provide the Museum Ludwig with a piece of furniture of their choice for the duration of the exhibition. They were also asked whether they could be named as lenders and if the the chairs or tables could be used by visitors.

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Everyday furniture is brought into the context of art, and thus the personal realm is made accessible to the public. The pieces of furniture testify to the varying tastes of local VIPs, and the assemblage of these chairs and tables in the room leads us to speculate about an imaginary gathering and temporary community under the roof of the public institution.

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Mountains of Encounter And Sol LeWitt Upside Down – K123456, Expanded 1078 Times, Doubled and Mirrored

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〈Mountains of Encounter〉, 2008. Alumium venetian blinds, powder-coated aluminum hanging structure, steel wire rope, moving spotlights, floodlights, platform ladder, cable, Dimension variable, Joint acquisition by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst and the Museum Ludwig on the occasion of the 2018 Wolfgang Hahn Prize, Installation view, Wessen Geschichte (Whose (His)story), Kustverein in Hamburg, 2008 ⒸHaegue Yang photoⒸFred Dott, Hamburg

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The title Mountains of Encounter refers to a meeting betweenthe Korean independence fighter Kim San and the American journalist Nym Wales in 1937 in the Chinese mountain region of Yan’an, then the stronghold of the Chinese Red Army. Inspired by the multiple secret meetings of two strangers outside their homeland, Wales later wrote a biography of Kim San. His story is representative of many Korean freedom fighters who were politically active not in their homeland but mostly in China and Japan. While the composition of red blinds appears as a mountain landscape in the room, both monumental and romantic, the slowmoving searchlights simultaneously convey the oppressive atmosphere of being watched. Even without knowing the background of this risky encounter between two figures fighting for a cause, the artistic abstraction of their story offers a sense of the conflict between radical social engagement and a life in isolation.

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〈Sol LeWitt Upside Down – K123456, Expanded 1078 Times, Doubled and Mirrored〉, 2015. Aluminum Venetian blinds, powder-coated aluminum hanging structure, steel wire rope, fluorescent tubes, cable; 878x563x1088cm. installation view(with further works), 《Come Shower or Shine, It is Equally Blissful》, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China, 2015, ⒸKurimanzutto, Mexico City and Haegue Yang, PhotoⒸTang Xuan

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By contrast, the second large-scale installation with venetian blinds, 〈Sol LeWitt Upside Down – K123456, Expanded 1078 Times, Doubled and Mirrored〉, which is based on a cubic structure by the minimal artist Sol LeWitt, has a much more hermetic effect.
The American Sol LeWitt experimented with architectural spatial structures, skeletal cubes, and three-dimensional grids, which he reduced to a minimum and often built out of metal or wood. Yang reinterprets LeWitt’s work with blinds. She enlarges his modular structures, condenses, doubles, and mirrors them, and finally turns them upside down−both metaphorically and physically.
The cool aura typical of LeWitt’s works thus reveals an impermeable intensity in Yang’s appropriation that recalls the following quotation by LeWitt: “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.”

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Hardware Store Collages and Trustworthies

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〈Hardware Store Collages – Bauhaus Door Handles #1〉, 2012. Clippings from hardware store catalogues on chromoiux paper, mouted on alu-dibond, framed, 51.2 x 71.2 cm. photoⒸStudio Haegue Yang, Image provided by Kukje Gallery

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Haegue Yang used and continues to use various product catalogues in different ways: at the beginning of her studies in Frankfurt, they served as a German dictionary to expand her artistic vocabulary, and to this day they continue to be an inexhaustible source of material for her Hardware Store Collages. Tools, screws, and other objects such as door handles as well as bathroom and office furniture unfold in every variation, sometimes giving rise to ornamental patterns and complex geometrical or seemingly mathematical formations.

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〈Diamond Glow - Trustworthy X - x#137〉, 2012. various security envelopes and graph paper on cardboard, framed, 2 parts, 102.2x72.2cm, 142.6x102.6cm. private collection, Seoul

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The series Trustworthies, which has been ongoing since 2010, is composed of collages made from the inner lining of security envelopes printed with different patterns; horizontal stripes give the impression of rolling waves, diagonal stripes look like rays, and other formations produce kaleidoscopic patterns. Envelopes with an inner lining are still used for confidential correspondence by various organizations and companies when sending security codes and bills, or to inspire confidence and give their logos and emblems a global presence. These works not only recall Yang’s central theme of the (geometric) folding and unfolding of history, communication, and space, but also her reflection on various types of movement.

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5, Rue Saint-Benoît

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〈5, Rue Saint-Benoît〉, 2008. 8 pieces, various materials, dimensions variable, Installation view, Beyond the Box. Sammlung Dohmen, Lopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren, 2017. Dohmen Collection, AachenⒸHaegue Yang, PhotoⒸUlrike Baumgart, art-documentation,bonn. Image provided by Kukje Gallery

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The title of the installation 〈5, Rue Saint-Benoît〉 refers to the Paris address of the French author Marguerite Duras, whose life and novels provide an important source of inspiration for Haegue Yang’s work. Duras’s apartment was a meeting place of the Resistance and, after World War II, the place where Duras nursed her husband, who had been freed from Dachau concentration camp, back to health. The different containers of this venetian blind installation correspond to the dimensions and shapes of various kitchen and bathroom appliances in Yang’s apartment, such as a shower stall, a radiator, and a refrigerator. To the artist, in no other room are the private and public as well as physical and mental spheres more clearly intertwined than in the bathroom or the kitchen, where she worked for most of the time during the creation of the work: I am interested in the potentiality of the kitchen as one of the most private spaces, which opens itself most generously and genuinely to the others, even under difficult circumstances. That’s what I got from Duras as well as from my mother. Both eagerly cooked for and fed people, even hid wanted political criminals in their homes.

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part of 〈5, Rue Saint-Benoît〉, 2008. 8 pieces, various materials, dimensions variable, Installation view, Beyond the Box. Sammlung Dohmen, Lopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren, 2017. Dohmen Collection, AachenⒸHaegue Yang, PhotoⒸUlrike Baumgart, art-documentation,bonn. Image provided by Kukje Gallery

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Yang’s metal containers do not radiate the protective aura that is quite unnoticeably and naturally inscribed in homes by their appliances−these silent servants of civilization. Inside, cables and lights form an electrical thicket. Disturbances in the sensitive domestic balance, triggered by interpersonal conflicts, power failures, and the effects of politically heated situations, can develop as symbols here. At the same time, the home as a protective shelter shows itself as a complex, communal space for thought and social and political engagement.

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BIOGRAPHY

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Portrait of Haegue Yang in front of her work 〈Sol LeWitt Upside Down – K123456, Expanded 1078 Times, Doubled and Mirrored〉, 2015. Installation view kurimanzutto, Mexico City, ©Haegue Yang & Kurimanzutto, Mexico City, PhotoⒸAbigail Enzaldo, Image provided by Kukje Gallery

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Haegue Yang was born in 1971 in Seoul to a writer and a journalist. She lives and works in Berlin and Seoul. Since 2017 she has been teaching at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, where she herself began her studies in 1994. She had a double appearance at theVenice Biennale in 2009 (in the programmatic exhibition fare mondi and in a solo exhibition in the Korean Pavilion), and in 2012 she participated in dOCUMENTA (13). Her recent solo exhibitions were held at the following institutions, among others: Kunsthaus Graz (2017/2018); KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2017); Centre Pompidou, Paris(2016); Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto (2016);Hamburger Kunsthalle (2016); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2015); Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); Bonner Kunstverein (2014); Aubette 1928 and Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Strasbourg (2013); Hausder Kunst, Munich (2012); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2011); New Museum, New York (2010); and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2009). In 2018 she is also participating in the 21st Biennale of Sydney and the 10th Liverpool Biennial. Her first survey exhibition in North America will be at theMuseum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in May 2019.

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To Read More :
Influences: Haegue Yang
https://frieze.com/article/influences-haegue-yang

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For more info :
Homepage www.museum-ludwig.de
Phone +49 221 221 26165