haegue yang at gwangju art biennale 2010

‘series of vulnerable arrangements-concerns towards personal limits’ (2008), installation with 7 lightsculptures, dimensions variable image © designboomkorean artist haegue yang is the recipient of the young artist award at this year’s gwangju art biennale.

haegue yang (b.1971 seoul, south korea) ‘s work consists of delicate, purposeful arrangements of everyday objects and devices – venetian blinds, light bulbs, fans, heaters, air conditioners, electric wires – which envelope the senses and create abstract narratives. yang’s installation works often form a kind of playground for perceptual experience. a room of yang’s sculptures might offer such sensations as being caressed by a cooling breeze of the radiating heat of a portable heater, patterns of light filtered through a thicket of entangled venetian blinds or odors wafting through the room from a scent emitter. since 2006, yang has created collections of apparatuses and objects that share a certain provisional, fragile quality but which nevertheless manage to maintain cohesion and aesthetic balance. one of these collective groupings, ‘series of vulnerable arrangements – concern towards personal limits’ (2008), consist of a series of sculptures assembled out of what appears to be clothing racks or stands for medical equipment that have been festooned with all manner of materials – mardi gras beads, christmas lights, seashells, tinsel, colored electrical cords, light bulbs, and various other detritus. in light of the work’s subtitle, the sculptures take on a curious anthropomorphic cast, becoming, perhaps, proxy representations of different guises that yang might assume in order to discover the contours of her own limits. taken as kind of an injunction, this practice of projection might extend to the viewer as well – perhaps they are works that ask us not to expand on our sensory understanding, but to expand on the sense of ourselves through these strange, vulnerable proxies.

image © designboom

image © designboom

detail © designboom

image © designboom

detail © designboom

image © designboom

image © designboom

image © designboom

image © designboom

image © designboom

image © designboom