Haegue Yang

Biography

In 2004 Haegue Yang packed up works that she could neither sell nor store, put the crates on shipping pallets and showed the resulting pile as “Storage Piece”. A difficulty of her practice became an artwork. Three years later, in 2007, it was unpacked again in the Berlin showroom of the Haubrok collection.

She was born on 12 December 1971 in Seoul. Her father, Hansoo Yang, is a journalist: together with some hundred and sixty colleagues he was dismissed from the newspaper Dong-A Ilbo after protesting against censorship under Park Chung-hee, and afterwards worked for an international construction company. Her mother, Misoon Kim, is a writer. Both took part in the Minjung Movement, the South Korean popular democratic movement of the 1970s and 1980s.

She studied sculpture at Seoul National University and graduated in 1994. In 1995 she moved to Germany, to the Städelschule in Frankfurt, where she studied with Georg Herold. In 1996–97 she was an exchange student at Cooper Union in New York. She received her master’s degree (Meisterschüler) in 1999. In 2002 she held a residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. Her first solo exhibition took place in 2000 at the Barbara Wien gallery in Berlin.

Yang’s materials are deliberately domestic: drying racks, lightbulbs, yarn, electrical cables, Venetian blinds. The blinds filter the light in the gallery and divide the space into segments, so that the viewer gets several vantage points. To these things she adds what works on something other than the eye: steam from a humidifier, temperature changes from a heater and an air conditioner, bells, moving theatre lights, diffused scents. The “Series of Vulnerable Arrangements” (2006–8) was made this way. She also makes graphic wall pieces that resemble theatre scenery. Yang places her manner between minimalism and conceptualism. Conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s influenced her, but in her words the very notion has to be redefined in relation to art today. Abstraction, she believes, does not rule out narrative: a story is possible without setting its own limits. “Sallim”, shown at the 2009 Venice Biennale, refers to housework and, through it, to questions of gender, religion, migration and class. She has at times pushed back against readings that reduce her art to a diasporic experience. On the relation of aesthetics and politics she has said that the best thing about aesthetics is that the politics permeating it are totally invisible.

Her works often draw on her own biography, historical events, film and literature. The installation “Sadong 30” (2006) was made in an empty residential house in Incheon, on Sadong street. The performance “The Malady of Death” has been running since 2010. “Dress Vehicles” (2012) are moving sculptures. Among her outdoor works is “Migratory DMZ Birds on Asymmetric Lens” (2020).

She has taken part in the São Paulo Biennial (2006), the Carnegie International (2008), the Turin Triennial (2008), documenta 13 in Kassel (2012), the Sharjah Biennial (2015) and the Lyon Biennale (2015), the Sydney and Liverpool biennials (2018), and the Singapore Biennale (2022). Solo exhibitions have been held at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2009), the New Museum in New York (2010), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2011), the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2016), the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2015), the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2016), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2019), Tate St Ives (2020) and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in South Korea (2020).

In 2018 the exhibition “ETA 1994–2018” opened at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and a catalogue raisonné of more than 1,400 works was published at the same time. On the opening day, 17 April, Yang received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize, and in October of the same year the Republic of Korea Cultural and Art Award (Presidential Citation). Earlier came the Cremer Prize (2005) and the Baloise Prize (2007), and later, in 2022, the Benesse Prize of the Singapore Biennale. Since 2017 she has been a professor of fine arts at the Städelschule, and her studio is in Kreuzberg, Berlin. Her works are held by the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate, the Walker Art Center, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and museums in Seoul.