Identified for immersive sculptures and installations that interact the senses, Seoul-born artist Haegue Yang seems towards widespread supplies and conventional craft strategies to discover urgent points. She usually transforms home objects like Venetian blinds, electrical followers, and even cans of Spam into dynamic, summary works that touch upon sociopolitical subjects like migration, labor, and exile.
Though the artist has risen to worldwide recognition for her three-dimensional items, an exhibition at The Arts Membership of Chicago friends into one other facet of her apply. Flat Works surveys twenty years of Yang’s work, prints, and collages, together with her fascinating collection, Mesmerizing Mesh.
Geometric, floral motifs characterize the alluring compositions constituted of reduce and folded hanji, paper derived from mulberry bark. Mesmerizing Mesh references shamanistic traditions, notably in Korea, Japan, China, and Slavic areas, and what comes from communing with the spirit world.
In line with a press release concerning the collection, the symmetric works allude to “sumun, a sheet hung from the ceiling in rituals…to keep away evil spirits,” whereas the extra figurative, anthropomorphic items “resemble soul sheets (nukjeon), in which the shaman blows a spirit treated as the identical entity of the deceased being honored.”
Like her sculptures, these collages equally recontextualize a humble, on a regular basis materials. Though they’re two-dimensional, the layered works convey depth, every showing as a sort of portal guiding viewers into an entrancing, mystical realm.
Flat Works continues by December 20 in Chicago.
