Kukje/ Tina Kim Gallery Showcases Haegue Yang’s Hardware-Filled Practice at ARTINTERNATIONAL

Carefully choreographed experiences, Yang’s installations are assemblages of ready-mades: drying racks wrapped in colorful yarn, rotating industrial fans arranged on movable steel stands, decorative lights strung from thin electrical cords, even infrared heaters and scent emitters. Yang alters these everyday objects and finds poetry and beauty in their mundane forms. 

Presently Yang has works on display in a group exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York and in the Vienna Biennale. Later this month the artist will unveil works at the Biennale de Lyon. And, in October, she will have a solo show at Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. This weekend she presents a suite of works at Istanbul’s ARTINTERNATIONAL fair.

Yang, who was born and raised in South Korea, began her artistic career in the late nineties, when she moved to Berlin. She continues to live and work in the German capital, splitting her time between there and Seoul). Her diverse projects have been inspired by various moments in art history and characters from the past, often touching upon themes of travel and migration. In 2004, she famously exhibited a packed crate of her own unsold work, which was purchased by a German collector and subsequently exhibited in 2009 as Storage Piece at LACMA, where it was displayed in various stages of “unpacking” in an almost performance art-like manner.

For the 2015 edition of ARTINTERNATIONAL, Kukje/ Tina Kim Gallery is showing a selection of Yang’s work, highlighting the diversity of this prolific artist’s practice through sculptures and a representative sampling of limited edition prints. Among the works on view are spray-painted prints, paper collages that explore quotidian objects, photographs of traditional Japanese origami works, an anthropomorphic synthetic straw-crafted moveable statue, and intricately crafted works created from brass-plated bells that ring in unison when moved.