Haegue Yang is a Korean-born and Berlin-based artist who, in her artworks, has crossed various boundaries, like regions and artistic genres. Haegue Yang usually uses domestic objects, such as a grid of rubber ropes, plastic, steel grab-bars, or LED lights, and transforms them into an amazing works of art.
Installation view of the exhibition “Haegue Yang: Handles”. Photograph by Denis Doorly. Courtesy of artist and MoMA. https://www.moma.org/
Yang’s Handles is an installation that involves big moving bells, dazzling geometries, other enchanted sculptures, light, and sound. The background of this artwork is colorful patterns with some steel grab-bars that were mounted on the wall. The other steel bars become handles to move the sonic sculpture. The bell sculptures make a subtle sound when it is moved by the performers. These bells’ sound reminds us of shamanistic rites. Yang’s adding the sound of chirping birds throughout the space, which is a cut recording from a live broadcast of the Inter-Korean Summit in 2018, at the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.
Installation view of the exhibition “Haegue Yang: Handles”. Photograph by Heidi Bohnenkamp. Courtesy of artist and MoMA. https://www.moma.org/
Yang was inspired by Sophie Taeuber-Arp and G. I. Gurdjieff. Sophie Taeuber-Arp is a Zurich Dada artist, textile designer, and modern dancer that has worked across the media from fine to applied arts. George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff is a Greco-Armenian mystic and philosopher, who has a basic assertion on the human life that’s similar to sleep, in which we need hard effort to reach the transcendence of the sleeping state, but after that, we experience a remarkable vitality and awareness.
Yang was also inspired by conceptual art that emphasizes the idea behind the work, even the idea is more important than the artwork. For example, Sol LeWitt’s work, A Wall Divided Vertically into Fifteen Equal Parts, is a diagram that contains instructions on how this work is built. Conceptual art raises some important questions about art: what does make art as ‘art’? Does art always involve the aesthetic sense? Can art exist only in our mind, without being the object of sense experience? Where is the art truly happens? In our minds or the real world?
Yang’s Handles offers a wide range of sensory experiences from visual, tactile, movement, hearing, to scent. It can also triggers certain memories in the viewer’s mind, from migration phenomena, mystical landscape, to political resonance.
Haegue Yang’s Handles can be viewed through February 28, 2021, at the MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art). You can buy a timed ticket online, on the MoMA’s website.
Haegue Yang. Courtesy of National Gallery, Singapore. https://www.nationalgallery.sg/