ARRIVALS

Kukje Gallery is very pleased to announce the opening of Haegue Yang’s new exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz. In addition to showcasing a selection of her most important works, Yang has also created 33 new light sculptures that enigmatically populate the third floor like alien life-forms. What is more, the artist has created her largest installation to date for the Bregenz show, consisting of approximately 200 aluminum venetian blinds, which will occupy the museum’s entire second floor with an impressive weightlessness.

The complex installations, sculptures, objects, photographs, videos, and slide projections, which in their atmospheric intensity appear equally poetic and conceptual, negate any unequivocal interpretation. Even if issues such as cultural background and references to other social and political questions are repeatedly noticeable, Haegue Yang’s work captivates precisely because of its ambiguity, which is rooted as much in the conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, as in an engagement with current theoretical discourses. This is already clearly demonstrated in the extensive presentation of older works on the first floor of the museum.

The structure of the newly created aluminum venetian blinds work which defines a large rectangle located diagonally within the space and partly derives from the grid of the museum’s glass ceiling, is accented by five high piles of a tower-like construction. The aluminum venetian blinds, primarily painted in silver but with a select few in gradients of color, combine with eight movable spotlights mounted to the walls as well as scent machines to cause a strong visual and sublimely olfactory effect.

Haegue Yang has arranged her new light sculptures that are similar to those shown at the Venice Biennale, on the third floor of Kunsthaus Bregenz in the form of small groups, as pairs or individually. In contrast to comparable earlier works, her new works developed especially for Bregenz distinguish themselves by an expressive strength of almost baroque opulence. This is because in addition to the variously colored light bulbs and other elements from lamps she employs artificial plants, wigs, and everyday objects – that is seemingly organic and artificial devices – with an intensity that has to date been unusual for her. In do­ing so she fabricates objects that alternate in character between creatures originating from remote galaxies, primitive people and hippy-like apparitions. The impression of animated arrangements of cult objects is ad­ditionally enhanced by a background soundtrack: in the mornings, at midday and in the evenings the space is filled by Igor Strawinski’s ballet music Le Sacre du Printemps, a composition revolutionary for its time. Strawinski’s almost religious, primitive, and challengingly avant-garde drama seems to resonate within the exhibition’s title Arrivals, which self-critically and humorously qualifies the energetic, optimistic gesture of such an impressive show.