The works of Haegue Yang, Korean contemporary artist, conjure uncanny reminders of rituals and fairy tales, and the mysterious ‘other’
- From a distance, Haegue Yang’s Sonic Rescue Ropes appears inconsequential; look closer and its fat cords remind one of the ropes church bell ringers pull
- Yet they are covered in thousands of bells, and when M+ museum staff ‘activate’ them by shaking them, they remind one of how bells are rung in Korean temples.
Haegue Yang might well be talking about her own art when describing how she felt about one particularly mystifying book by Marguerite Duras.
“There is no ‘click’ [she snaps her fingers]. It is not art that you ‘get’. It is very much about lingering. There is no wisdom on how to live life. It is totally useless. But you keep getting attracted back and you have to deal with it,” she said of the French writer’s Malady of Death.
Yang has had the 1982 novella translated into multiple languages and staged readings of it since 2010, including two Cantonese readings in Hong Kong in December 2015.
Born in Seoul, the artist splits her time between South Korea and Germany, where she is a professor at her alma mater, the Städelschule Academy of Fine Arts in Frankfurt. In August, she visited Hong Kong to see her work Sonic Rescue Ropes (2022) at the M+ museum of visual culture just before it was to be taken down.
I stopped making light sculptures because of exhaustion. With the sonic sculptures, I am still waiting to be done with them.
Its ropes were suspended from ceilings of different heights, draped on hooks and dangled down the museum’s central lightwell to Found Space, the lowest basement exhibition area.