“Abstraction is not … Simplified way of thinking: it’s a leap – a jump in a dimension that otherwise can’t be understood,” says Haegue YangWhose multimedia installations and sculptures explore a wide range of material associations, whereby the senses are immersed. Series as Light sculptures And Sonic sculptures Defy Genres, which often combine ready-made, mass-produced items with industrially created substances.
By the Nasher Sculpture Center In Dallas, Yang’s Solo exhibition Lost countries and sunken fields Involved viewers in a “dialectic of contrasts: light and dark, aerial photo and grounded, floating and heavy, reserve and dense, interior and exterior,” says an explanation. The show follows the first major survey by the artist in the United Kingdom in the Hayward Gallery in London, who started with a collage-forward celebration of the work created in the last 20 years.
Working between Seoul and Berlin, hybridizes folk customs and craftsmanship, everyday items and allotment techniques in pieces that combine sculpture, collage, text, video, wallpaper and sound. “Sonic Intermediates – Triad Walker Trinity,” for example, lay steel frames in small bells, metal rings, plastic rope and more, which evoke vague animal forms that move on casters.
Time and geography collapse into an abstracted visual language that combines modern and pre-modern, art history and literature and themes of displacement, migration, forced exile and global diasporas. Her works “link various geopolitical contexts and histories in an attempt to understand and comment on our own time,” says a statement of Kurimanzuttowho represents the artist.
The Gallery also presents a simultaneous exhibition entitled Mysterious abstractions, Including two-dimensional collage works supplemented with an archive display of pieces by Mexican craftsmen. Yang continues to investigate cultural heritage and ritual symbolism by materials while it forwards “a proposal to lead our lives today with a holistic view of mobility and technology, respect for spirituality, as well as contemplation about the resilient adaptability of both nature and humans,” says an explanation.
Mysterious abstractions will continue until April 5 in Mexico -city, and Lost countries and sunken fields runs until April 27 in Dallas.
