Haegue Yang Writes Poetry with Household Goods

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 249, ‘Object Lessons’

An art of everyday objects, but without nostalgia – is it possible? Since the early 2000s, the South Korean artist Haegue Yang has been making work that among other things – a persistent reflection on movement and exile, a lightly worn phenomenology of presence and mobility, an unusually deft attitude to engaging local or Indigenous ideas and craft – seems to answer that question with an energetic ‘Yes’. In ‘Leap Year’, her 2024 retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London, and ‘Lost Lands and Sunken Fields’, a new show at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Yang – through sculpture, text, video, photography and more – looks at quotidian, often domestic things with a sidelong perspective trained by a life overseas. This gaze takes delight in the particularities and repetitions of the material world and, while it sometimes invokes painful episodes, collective or individual, it is never melancholic, never treats objects as ghosts or memorials. Instead, filled with flair and promise, they wait to chime into being like the small bells that are everywhere in Yang’s work.

This is true even in an early work that seems ripe with capacity for memory and mourning. In 2006, Yang made Sadong 30, a site-specific installation at an abandoned house in Incheon (on the outskirts of Seoul) that had belonged to her grandparents. Yang’s work included light sculptures, delicate origami and an object that would return in her oeuvre: a clothes rack – a kind of international symbol of modest or temporary living – that here was covered in fabric, but at the Hayward Gallery exhibition and elsewhere has unfolded in myriad forms: monumental, angelic, almost figurative and human-scaled. Of Sadong 30, Yang speculates in her video essay ‘Squandering Negative Spaces’ (2006): ‘It seems that here perhaps it is possible to add an arbitrary composition to a non-visible place.’ Objects such as the clothes rack – also humidifiers, kitchen sinks, all more or less hidden behind ubiquitous window blinds – may point to specific episodes and living spaces in Yang’s life, or they may be generalizable instances of a style called international banal.

In Yang’s work, the object is never itself alone, entire and independent. Self-involved and inviting, replete and unresolved, her sculptures bristle with handles. Which category, writes the sociologist Georg Simmel in his 1911 essay ‘The Handle’, ‘stretches out, so that it may seize the other and join it to itself, and be grasped by and joined to it’. A handle both is and is not a part of the thing it asks or allows us to hold or lift. At times, Yang’s handles seem integral and organic, even (or especially) when they are attached to modular and primarily metallic sculptures, such as Sol LeWitt Vehicle – 6 Unit Cube on Cube without a Cube (2018). In other works, the handles are incongruous and near-comical: the black metal hafts, for example, affixed to generic-traditional pieces in ‘The Intermediates’ (2015–ongoing), a series of globular beings with slim rectilinear protrusions or appendages. In a canny reversal of artifice and organicism, Yang has joined thin, twisted sticks or branches to the angular iridescence of her Reflected Red-Blue Cubist Dancing Mask (2018). 

That work is just one of the most self-declaring examples of Yang’s abiding interest in 20th-century art and design, whether local or international. An early work, What I’d Love to Have at Home (2001), paired four sets of metal shelves with a stark Eiermann sofa: an ideal arrangement impossible for the artist to afford in her own life at the time. Objects embody the future, but there is a long history, overlapping with modernism itself, of lamenting the ways that objects today are somehow less themselves, less present and intimately known. (There are revolutionary and reactionary versions of this nostalgia – philosophically, you will find it in both Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger.)

Yang seems unpersuaded by such sentiments, however. She is personally somewhat more mobile and geographically untethered than most artists, in a field that wearily prides itself on a certain luxe nomadism. It means she is attuned, on arriving in London or Dallas or Berlin or Hong Kong, to seeing rhyme and reprise among objects – a type of duplication that she doesn’t simply reduce to the boring outcomes of supply chains and globalized production. In such objects, Yang finds reminders of artworks and modes of exhibition: plain white window blinds become the surfaces of Sol LeWitt Vehicle; a standard Korean storefront table is a reminder of sculptural plinths. Contemporary things and materials announce an alikeness that is present too, as Yang sees it, in the folk art and traditional design she discovers as she travels.

To be modern is also to imagine that objects are all against us, conspiring at night, like impish toys, to cause havoc with the coming day. The clothes rack is a simple machine or trap for producing complex accidents; who has not caught a finger in one of these things, or been sheerly mystified by the mechanism of its folding and unfolding? Domestic objects in Yang’s art are also pregnant with this potential for disaster. In the text work Bathroom Contemplation (2000), the artist and her mother, writer and left-wing activist Misoon Kim, recount the latter’s visit to see her daughter in Germany. Kim did not know that European bathroom floors were typically not drained, and a flooding incident ensued. For sure, the realm of contemporary things and materials may be generic and familiar, but there is always too this embarrassment of arrival, hesitation, possible blunder. However known and near at hand, objects are always foreign, waiting to be found.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 249 with the headline ‘The International Banal’

Haegue Yang’s ‘Lost Lands and Sunken Fields’ is on view at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, until 27 April

^{Main image: Haegue Yang, The Intermediate – Five-Legged Frosty Fecund Imoogi (detail), 2020, exhibition view, ‘MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2020: Haegue Yang’. Courtesy: the artist, MMCA, and Kukje Gallery, Seoul; photograph: Cheolki Hong}