“MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2020: Haegue Yang – O2 & H2O” is the seventh exhibition in a ten-year initiative hosted by the MMCA and sponsored by Hyundai Motor launched in 2014 to support and feature an annual showcase of a mid-career Korean artist. The Hyundai Motor Series has previously included Lee Bul in 2014, Ahn Kyuchul in 2015, Kimsooja in 2016, Im Heung-soon in 2017, Choi Jeonghwa in 2018 and Park Chan-kyong in 2019.
The MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2020 exhibition provides a unique opportunity to explore Haegue Yang’s prolific career and understand her work in-depth. The show also sees the release of the first anthology on the artist in Korean, Air and Water: Writings on Haegue Yang 2001-2020, co-published by the MMCA and Hyunsil Publishing. The book features a selection of 36 writings by international art critics, academis, curators, journalists and artists who have engaged with Yang’s career over the last two decades. The publication offers insight into her artistic development and trajectory.
Working between her native Seoul and her adopted Berlin, Haegue Yang (b. 1971, Seoul) is a critically acclaimed artist, active internationally since the mid-1990s. She is known for her genre-defying, multimedia installations that attempt to trace sensorial experience. Her expansive oeuvre, spanning two-decades of artistic career, employs diverse materials of ordinary, industrial and quasi-folk nature. Her works forsake hierarchy, and freely traverse boundaries, exploring the relationship between the narrative and the abstract, domesticity, migration and borders. Her visual language includes extensive cultural references encompassing historical figures, events, and natural and societal phenomena.
“MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2020: Haegue Yang – O2 & H2O” is a major solo exhibition featuring 40 recent works by the artist that further explore the abstraction of reality and engage with themes of boundaries, animism and folklore. Pivotal to the exhibition, as the title suggests, are the natural elements of air and water, scientifically abstracted into O2 and H2O, their chemical symbols of human invention. As MMCA writes, the title “O2 & H2O” “reflects the artistʼs persistent interest in tracing sensorial experiences with the abstract language of art”. There also is a resonance with the artist’s 2002 work Air and Water presented in her exhibition of the same title at Dresdner Bank in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, that same year.
Yang’s works create hybrids of reality, by transcending time and space, and materials, to give birth to sculptures that recall familiar objects while rendering them unfamiliar and uncanny. These products of the artist’s fantastic rumination take the form of quasi-living organisms representing the inanimate in our everyday life.
Her 2020 scultpural series Sonic Domesticus, for example, reflects on the relationship between organisms and machines, objects and humans, by using small bells woven together to create larger-than-life everyday household items. Scissors, hairdryers, pots and clam tongs common to every home take on an antrophomorphic form by being fitted with wheel and handles that allow them to be moved around. The resulting ‘creatures’ make a rattling sound when they move, transforming the everyday image into a hauntingly surreal presence out of a folktale. Of particular significance to the artist is a series of eight sculptures, Sonic Clotheshorse ‒ Dressage #1-8. The works are all made with a laundry drying rack, which for the artist is a metaphorical evidence of sallim – a Korean word for ‘homemaking’.
Ever since her 2006 piece Sadong, presenting in her firt solo exhibition in Korea, Yang has created multiple works in diverse media referencing the laundry drying rack as a significant household tool or as an object inherently bearing the motion of folding and unfolding. For Sonic Clotheshorses, the artist dressed up the racks with bells, attached handles, and equipped them with casters. She developed over 40 different shapes and has realised eight pieces to date. With their cheerful sounds, the racks are like horse riders demonstrating their skills within a specific spatial delineation of a dressage.
Bells are omnipresent in ritual culture worldwide, their metallic sound leading people to a more elevated spiritual state, facilitating the connection between the human and the otherworldly divine. Yang also uses them in Sonic Ropes, formed by linking bells together with metal rings. The ropes drape down from the 15-metre-high ceiling, their rattling sound when shaken resonating vertically, leading the gaze up to the sky outside the window. In traditional fairytales, ropes are objects that enable an escape from real-world trials; Sonic Ropes in turn stimulate our sensorial imagination, opening up our mind to cosmic forces, as the brother and sister in the Korean fairy tale who became the Sun and the Moon.
Yet another reference to the world beyond is presented by Nonagonal Door Opening, doorknobs installed on a white wall of the gallery, in what seems an apparently random arrangement. However, the ‘constellation’ they form with their carefully planned placement is the nonagon, a sort of door into the ‘other world’, used by mystic philosophers like George I. Gurdjieff (1872/1877‒1949) and referenced to in Yang’s works before.
Yang’s exploration and materialisation of the grotesque can be seen in The Intermediaries (2015-2020), a series of sculptures made of artificial straws and other materials that recall primitive idols, shamanic rituals and folklore. On show are scultpures created from 2017 to 2020, and representing serpent and tentacled creatures, the folkloric figure of the Imoogi and tribal warrior shields. Early works in the series employed a traditional straw weaving technique as an appropriation of traditional folk imagery. The series gradually evolved, with diverse weaving methods and objects. At MMCA, four suspended works evoke the Imoogi, a serpent-creature not yet transformed into a dragon, while the wall-mounted pieces look like a showcase of ceremonial tribal shields or masks.
The craftmanship celebrated in such works is the subject of an exhibition within the exhibition, Mok Woo Workshop – 108 Wooden Spoons, which presents objets dʼart and texts of the carpenter and writer Woohee Kim, an acquaintance of the artist and her family, contemplating on the meaning of everyday life, locality, community, and performativity in craftsmanship.
Five Doing Un-Doing (2020), a series of five banners hanging from the corridor’s ceiling, continues with the references to the spiritual world. The banners don powerful graphics and exaggerated typography, recalling popular advertising or propaganda flyers. Accompanied by balloons and fitted with hanging shamanist paraphernalia made of Hanji paper, the banners are secular visualizations of the five elements — water, wood, fire, earth and metal — symbolised by Obangsaek, Koreaʼs five essential colours — black, blue, red, yellow and white.
Installed among the banners are assemblages of speakers transmitting a sound project, Genuine Cloning, which offers a glimpse into the subtle use of artificial intelligence. The footage recorded as the North and South Korean leaders conversed on a pedestrian bridge during a live broadcast from the April 2018 inter-Korean summit at Panmunjeom included only the sounds of birds and the odd bit of camera noise. Yang adds her voice, replicated through AI technology, thus creating a kind of surreal entity.
While the sound project seems to catch the ambiguity of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the wallpaper piece DMZ Un-Do (2020) reflects the complexity of its spatiality. The work uses a visual language similar to the banners, while also recalling graffiti, with references as diverse as pollen, robot bees, solar panels, a portable electric fan, a hydroelectric power dam, an electricity transmission tower, lightning and a Lorenz attractor.
Yang’s diverse works play with multiple references, weaving a thread that leads the viewer in a seamless journey thorugh time and space, in and out of this and another world, or this reality and its abstraction. The artist carefully leads us through “O2 & H2O“, with nothing left to chance. The futuristic Silo of Silence – Clicked Core, a ten-meter-high sculpture installed in Seoul Box, makes use of Venetian blinds to create a spatial installation that challenges the viewers’ perspective as they move around and through it, in a sort of preparation to experience Yang’s multi-faceted exhibition.
C. A. Xuan Mai Ardia
“MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2020: Haegue Yang – O2 & H2O” is on view from 29 September 2020 to 28 February 2021 at MMCA, Seoul.