Haegue Yang: Several Reenactments

S.M.A.K. (Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent) presents the solo exhibition Several Reenactments by the internationally renowned artist Haegue Yang. Negotiating and traversing boundaries throughout her career—between different geographies, historical eras, and artistic styles—Yang creates materially rich works and compositionally specific installations and arrangements for each exhibition. Her refined yet singular vision of materiality, combined with an elegant sense of space and atmosphere, has contributed to the development of enveloping and resonant installations. Distinguished by its formal agility and capacity to convey a wide range of ideas, histories, perceptions, and emotions, Yang’s intriguing and evocative oeuvre encompasses large-scale sculptures and installations as well as works on paper, photography, video essays, audio pieces, sound, and text-based work. As sensorial as they are fluid, her immersive works result in “a kind of mapping of times and places that are not normally neighbours.”*

Several Reenactments is Yang’s first solo exhibition in a Belgian museum and pivots on notions of recurrence, reflecting the artist’s lasting preoccupation with doubling, mirroring, and reiterating. In this exhibition, Yang seeks out the obscure, mysterious, and yet inherently intense qualities of repetition in her work. A process of continuous circling creates a strong intercontextuality in her practice, to the extent that her works often appear as pairs or interconnected groups.

Yang has created a new seventeen-part work entitled Warrior Believer Lover—Version Sonic (2023) at S.M.A.K. Occupying the Central Gallery and arranged in groups, these sculptural ensembles are reenactments of another multi-part installation entitled Warrior Believer Lover (2011). Constituting a horizontally open sculptural field, Warrior Believer Lover—Version Sonic is accompanied by Igor Stravinsky’s ballet music, Le Sacre du Printemps (1913). For each Cabinet Gallery on either side of the Central Gallery, the artist has created displays that mirror each other and build a “quasi-symmetry.”

The exhibition provides an account of Yang’s sculpture, which possesses a remarkably rich materiality, being primarily composed of industrially manufactured objects that are employed with craft-based techniques. Several Reenactments introduces the seemingly oppositional dialectics that run throughout her oeuvre, most notably the artisanal and rigorous treatment of ready-mades. Other paired concepts that come to the fore at S.M.A.K. are abstraction and figuration, the artificial and the organic, traditional and futuristic. These coupled themes constantly mirror each other. Yang’s exhibition is in line with her artistic practice, unfolding in an institutional context, while proposing a discreet yet resolute artistic commitment in response to the urgent global issues surrounding migration, identity, and community. Excavating from unexpected, even imagined encounters, complex cross-linkages, and sometimes contradictory and disparate translations of forms, lives, cultures, eras, traditions, and practices, she unearths in the here and now shared meanings and distils plausible contemporary entities.

The exhibition at S.M.A.K. is curated by Karima Boudou and is realised in partnership between S.M.A.K. and HAM Helsinki Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland. With the support of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of Korea / Korean Cultural Center Brussels; Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin; Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; and dépendance, Brussels.

*Yang, quoted in Andy Battaglia, “Be There with Bells On!,” ARTnews, October 10, 2019.

Biography
Haegue Yang (b. 1971, Seoul, Korea) received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize from the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst, Ludwig Museum, Cologne in 2018 and was awarded the 13th Benesse Prize at the Singapore Biennale in 2022. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the following international institutions: Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2023); SMK—National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2022); Tate St Ives (2020); MoMA, New York (2019); The Bass, Miami Beach (2019); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2018); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016); Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); and Kunsthaus Bregenz (2011), amongst others. She also exhibited at the South Korea Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale (2009) and Documenta 13 (2012).