Documentation image of The Grand Balcony, La Biennale de Montréal, Montréal, Canada, 2016, adaptation for mezzaterra11 - flat gallery
Photo Guy L'Heureux, La Biennale de Montréal. Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York
We are pleased to present our 8th artist Haegue Yang (b.1971, Seoul), who lives and works in Seoul and Berlin and has exhibited internationally. For mezzaterra11 – flat gallery, Yang introduces an image, depicting a view of her complex installation on view at La Biennale de Montréal, Le Grand Balcon, Canada from 2016. Reflecting her ongoing concern with architectural and social layerings, Yang created a space of narrative, where our sights and thoughts encounter a desire to travel, migrate, and move over the given structure. The presented scenery at mezzaterra11 – flat gallery consists of a situation, where various sculptures are on display with the site demarcated by a shaped wall, itself wallpapered by Multiple Mourning Room (2012), another illusionary surface.
The characteristics of the mezzaterra11 – flat gallery space resonate with her original display in Montreal as they both address the juxtaposition of contradictory elements, such as front and back, rigidity and dynamics, concealment and revelation. Yang interacts with the plastic presence of sculptures as much as the representational flatness of wallpaper, playing also with graphical cuts through the shaped wall, filtering and creating layers between sculptures and wallpaper imagery. We hereby experience Yang’s installation at La Biennale de Montréal as a new ‘petit balcon’, a threshold for the multi-layered window of her complex oeuvre.
Haegue Yang's work explores the affective power of materials by destabilizing the distinction between the modern and pre-modern, and her vocabulary of visual abstraction with sensory experiences combine industrial fabrication and folk craftsmanship. Yang’s ongoing research is empowered by underlying references to art history, literature and political history, through which she re-interprets some of her recurrent themes: migration, postcolonial diasporas, enforced exile and social mobility. Notable exhibitions include Lingering Nous, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016); An Opaque Wind Park in Six Folds, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto (2016); The Malady of Death: Écrire and Lire (commissioned by M+), Hong Kong (2015); Shooting the Elephant 象 Thinking the Elephant, Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); Come Shower or Shine, It Is Equally Blissful, Ullens Center for Contemporary Arts UCCA, Beijing (2015); Family of Equivocations, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Strasbourg (2013); Accommodating the Epic Dispersion, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2012); Arrivals, Kunsthaus Bregenz (2011); Voice and Wind, New Museum, New York (2010); and Asymmetric Equality, REDCAT, Los Angeles (2008). Furthermore, her work has been included in the 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015); the Sharjah Biennial 12 (2015), dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012); the 8th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2010); and the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009).
