Let's continue yesterday's thread and keep on previewing exhibitions that will coincide with the next fashion weeks. As seen in previous posts, the calendar in Milan promises to be particularly rich and if you're popping around La Triennale for the De Carlo collection exhibition, don't forget to check out also "Haegue Yang: Tightrope Walking and Its Wordless Shadow" (7th September - 4th November).
Organised by the Triennale and Fondazione Furla, this is Yang's first institutional solo show in Italy and promises to be particularly intriguing for the wide range of media employed by the artist, going from paper collage to video essays, performative sculptures and large-scale installations.
"Tightrope Walking and Its Wordless Shadow" develops over three rooms comprising well-known works and new commissions.
The event opens with two works "Thread Installation, 134.9 m³" (2000-2018) and "Chalk Line Drawing, 81 m²" (2002-2018). The former consists in an almost invisible barrier of red cotton thread stretched between two walls at ten-centimeter intervals and imperceptibly slanted at an angle of exactly one degree which isolate and block off one corner of the room. The pattern created by the red barrier seems to continue on the walls thanks to the second installation consisting in a sequence of straight lines drawn in red chalk, which visually merge with the threads, creating an optical effect of subtle movement.
The numbers in the title indicate the surface area or volume of space the installations occupy in a given presentation, so they change in accordance with the space where they are installed.
The two works introduce the theme of geometry and the artist's passion for employing everyday materials in her work, as seen also in "Science of Communication #1 – A Study on How to Make Myself Understood" (2000), a sort of summary on a single A3 sheet of the cultural and language struggles the artist went through on a daily basis when in 1994 she moved from her native Korea to Germany to study in Frankfurt. Incommunicability also characterises her mirror series: hanging with their reflective side to the wall, Yang's mirrors turning their back on the viewer reject the expected function of reflecting what stands in front of them.
Fantasy and architecture meet instead in "Citadel" (2011), a monumental installation of 176 Venetian blinds occupying the centre of the exhibition. Visitors can move through these intricate modular structures while various scents that allude to an "elsewhere" drift through the space. The title evokes memories of an impenetrable fortress, but light comes through the walls of this structure and openings invite viewers to walk into and through it.
Walls decorated with mural-like piece from the graphic series "Trustworthies" (ongoing since 2010) occupy the next space: the series originated with the artist's chance discovery of the amazing variety of the security patterns printed inside envelopes to keep their contents confidential.
Focusing on the aesthetic potential of these patterns, Yang began collaging them into geometric compositions (strangely enough the fashion world still hasn't noticed them, but they would look amazing as prints on clothes; looks like Yang is another artist who will soon be co-opted by the fashion industry...): once collaged together these abstract landscapes of simple horizontal lines turn into very complex compositions with waves, refractions, windmills, x-shaped or interwoven forms and kaleidoscopes, incorporating origami paper, sandpaper, holographic paper, and graph paper.
These images form the background for two newly conceived performative sculptures from the "Dress Vehicles" series (ongoing since 2011).
Inspired by different forms of dance, such as the Sacred Dances of the Russian spiritualist G. I. Gurdjieff, and the geometric costumes of Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet (1922), these "Sonic Dress Vehicles" do not allow the wearer to freely move, but they are meant to dress performers as if they were masks, granting or obscuring an identity (there are many inspirations behind them, from drag queens to traditional mask dances and puppet theatre...).
The costumes become therefore a burden for the wearer but they can also be interpreted as empowering armours, hybrids that blend architecture, sculpture and performance in one piece.
This hybridic component of this exhibition combining abstractions and geometries, architectural narratives, unexpected forms and performance is also the main inspiration behind the title of the exhibition. Through her pieces Haegue Yang tries indeed to create a language whose potentiality is like a tightrope walk with each move powerfully dynamic and charged with both emotional and perceptual tension.
"Haegue Yang: Tightrope Walking and Its Wordless Shadow", La Triennale, Milan, 7th September - 4th November 2018.
Image credits for this post
Haegue Yang, Dress Vehicles, 2012
Installation view of The Tanks: Art in Action, Tate Modern, London, UK, 2012
M+ Collection, Hong Kong
Photo: Studio Haegue Yang
Haegue Yang, Cittadella, 2011
Aluminum venetian blinds, powder-coated aluminum hanging structure, steel wire rope, moving spotlights, scent emitters
420 x 2045 x 2123 cm
Courtesy of Kukje Gallery, Seoul
Installation view of Arrivals, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, 2011
Photo: Markus Tretter
Haegue Yang, Flashy Prismatic Composition - Trustworthy #232, 2013, Various envelope security patterns, graph paper, origami paper, framed
Haegue Yang
Installation view of Shooting the Elephant 象 Thinking the Elephant, Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea, 2015
Photo: Studio Haegue Yang
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