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

Haegue Yang (b. 1971, Seoul) is known for sculptures that orchestrate a wide range of banal objects into complex, anthropomorphic compositions, suspending the functionality of everyday tools and accentuating their objecthood and spirituality. In perhaps her most famous body of work, Venetian blinds are arranged with a Sol Lewitt-like precision in which the dialectics of inside and outside constructed by windows are dissolved by the opacity of the choreographed blinds. These blinds form an architecture whose totality cannot be captured by a single gaze, reminding one the half open structure of a stage.

Haegue Yang’s first solo exhibition in China will showcase one of the artist’s major Venetian blind sculptures in the Nave, creating a new spatial dynamic in the form of a passage. These are accompanied by sonic figures inspired by Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballett (1922). The sculptural objects evoke Schlemmer’s unique mode of costume design, which limited the dancers’ bodies and turned them into puppets to externalize and solidify corporeal hindrance. “Spice Moon,” a group of silkscreen works on paper made with spices, will be exhibited alongside these series, compounding audio and visual perception with an olfactory dimension.