October 1, 2020 - January 31, 2021
A leading artist of her generation, Haegue Yang (b. 1971 Seoul) is celebrated for her prolific and diverse work that evokes historical and contemporary narratives of migration, displacement and cross-cultural translation. For over two decades, Yang has been transforming how we experience everyday domestic materials, turning items such as venetian blinds, light bulbs, drying racks, knitting yarn and bells into meticulously constructed installations and sculptures. To unleash the historical and emotional resonances of these objects, Yang activates them with sounds, light, air, scents and movement. Featuring over 70 sculptures, installations and performances from the past twenty-five years, Haegue Yang: Emergence includes a selection of early works, as well as the installations: Anthology of Haegue Archives (1998), Afterimage (2006), Sallim (2009), and Boxing Ballet (2013-15). This is the first North American retrospective survey of Yang’s work to date. The AGO has also commissioned two new installations for the exhibition: a large-scale venetian blind work in the Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Sculpture Atrium and a mural-like wallpaper at the AGO’s South Entrance. An outsider searching for her own possible reading of the AGO Collection, Yang's choice of the Atrium as a site for a new work is inspired by the evidence of multiple layers of architectural history.
Organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario
Haegue Yang lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Seoul, South Korea. She is a Professor at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt am Main. For the opening of the expanded building of The Museum of Modern Art, New York on October 21, 2019, MoMA commissioned Yang to create an installation for the Marron Atrium. Handles has been highly praised for its performative power to render and weave seemingly irrelevant historical narratives into a singular immersive, mesmerizing and performative field.
Yang has participated in major international exhibitions including the 16th Istanbul Biennial (2019), the 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018), La Biennale de Montréal (2016), the 12th Sharjah Biennial (2015), the 9th Taipei Biennial (2014), dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel (2012) and the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009) as the South Korean representative as well as in the International Art Exhibition at the Arsenale.
Yang’s work is included in permanent collections such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; M+, Hong Kong, China; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, South Korea; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; Tate Modern, London, UK; Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Canada; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA.
Her work has been the subject of numerous monographs, including Haegue Yang: Anthology 2006–2018. Tightrope Walking and Its Wordless Shadow (2019); Haegue Yang: ETA 1994–2018 (2018); Haegue Yang: VIP’s Union (2017); and Haegue Yang: Family of Equivocations (2013).
Art Gallery of Ontario
317 Dundas Street West
Toronto, Ontario
M5T 1G