'series of vulnerable arrangements-concerns towards personal limits' (2008),
installation with 7 lightsculptures, dimensions variable
image © designboom

korean 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.



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