Past Solo Exhibition
Haegue Yang: Honesty Printed on Modesty 24.10.2013 — 23.11.2013
Information
Event has ended
24 October - 23 November 2013
About The Exhibition
Honesty Printed on Modesty is a new body of work by Haegue Yang (Berlin/Seoul) that surfaced during her residency at STPI last November. Inspired by her journey in Singapore, she embarked on an experiment to transform foods and spices into works of art that trace history, culture and economics. Obtained from local markets in Little India and Chinatown, these ingredients were used as colours and textures for direct print and papermaking through the combined efforts of the artist and the STPI workshop team.
Her use of modest everyday items explore themes such as Rabindranath Tagore’s notion of domesticity, where the less representational and ordinary is significant and necessary for life (otherwise known as the ‘passive quality’ of women). Shanghai greens, eggplants and instant noodles were endowed with a mystical and significant quality in Golden Singulars while humble spices integrated in Spice Sheets were used to reference a weightier subject Singapore’s colonial history as a commercial port city, and on a larger scale, Southeast Asia’s historical and political experience with colonialism. In Yang’s hands, these regular foods tell of a civilisation’s point of origin and transformation.
The printing process is accentuated in works such as Vegetable Prints, where traditional art techniques like dying and décalcomania were adapted. The embossed surface and traces of natural dye highlights the process by which they were made. Elsewhere, the cut marks in Cutting Board Prints reveal the unconventional printing process of slicing vegetables on paper; while the composition of abstract shadows hint at the movement of spray-painted origami objects on paper in Non-Foldings.These various acts of printing find their culmination in Color-Blown Craters and Duners, where Yang transformed rice grains, dried spices, Chinese herb medicine plants and dried vegetables into abstract landscapes, through an embossing and spraying process.
Yang’s exhibitions this October include Journal of Bouba/kiki, Glasgow Sculpture Studios in Scotland, Journal of Echomimetic Motions, Bergen Kunsthall in Norway, and Anachronistic Layers of Dispersion, Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, USA. Yang is the first artist to be featured in Platform STPI Projects (PSP) – a collaboration between STPI and Platform Projects Ltd that aims to identify, engage and challenge conceptually progressive artists to realise their creative ambitions through STPI’s Visiting Artists Programme.
About the artist
Haegue Yang
Residencies in 2012, 2016, 2019
Haegue Yang (b. 1971, Seoul, South Korea; based in Berlin, Germany and Seoul, South Korea) is one of South Korea’s foremost contemporary artists. Her work maps connections between disparate places, times and cultures, revealing how individual realities are nested in the lives and contexts of others. Born to political dissidents in the time of a nationwide struggle for democracy, her upbringing and delocalisation from constantly living between cities have shaped her interest in migration, displacement and alienation.
Diverse domestic and industrial items, such as venetian blinds, have featured in Yang’s work. They are configured into large-scale, site-specific installations that filter light and divide space in precise manners. Often embellishing them with artificially created sensations of heat, light, smell and humidity, Yang employs their sculptural and affective possibilities to explore themes such as art history, home and consumerism. In her Sonic Sculptures (2013–ongoing) series, metallic bells cover surfaces of abstract totemic forms, frequently placed on casters to be activated in elaborate choreographies. These works draw on cross-cultural ritual uses of bells, which have historically served to connect the human and spiritual realms. They invite viewers to experience the primordial power of aural qualities often associated with marginalised traditions.
Yang obtained her BFA from Seoul National University in 1994 and her MFA from Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main in 1999. Her work is held in major collections including Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; Hamburger Kunsthalle; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; M+, Hong Kong; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, South Korea; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
