<Special Online Exhibition> MMCA HYUNDAI MOTOR SERIES 2020

Haegue Yang―O₂ & H₂O

• Presenting forty works including new commissions that juxtapose diverse references with everyday objects.

• Dazzling aesthetics that synthesize complex matters such as narrative, abstraction, domesticity, and migration

■ MMCA HYUNDAI MOTOR SERIES

Hosted by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea(MMCA) and sponsored by Hyundai Motor, the MMCA Hyundai Motor Series is a ten-year initiative launched in 2014 to support and annually featured mid-career Korean artists. The ambition of this initiative is to open up new perspectives and possibilities for Korean contemporary art and to strengthen the foundation for Korean mid-career artists. So far, the works of Lee Bul in 2014, Ahn Kyuchul in 2015, Kimsooja in 2016, Im Heung-soon in 2017, Choi Jeonghwa in 2018, and Park Chan-kyong in 2019, have been presented within this framework.

The upcoming seventh edition of the MMCA Hyundai Motor Series will showcase the work of Hague Yang (b. 1971, Seoul). A substantive exhibition like this will offer local audiences a rare and in-depth view of Yang’s work. Yang has had her work exhibited internationally throughout her twenty-five-year career.

The annual MMCA Hyundai Motor Series introduces the works of artists with distinct perspectives to demonstrate the current state of and the dynamics of Korean contemporary art. This initiative, an example of corporate sponsorship, aims to make continuous and substantial contributions to the development of Korean contemporary art, generating mutually beneficial synergies between art and business.

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA, director Youn Bummo), is pleased to announces an upcoming solo exhibition of Haegue Yang for the MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2020. Known for her hybrid sculptures and large-scale abstract installations that interweave global narratives with industrially manufactured, domestic, and folkloric materials, Yang addresses themes that recur in her work such as the relationship between narration and abstraction, domesticity, migration, and borders.

Based in Seoul and Berlin, Haegue Yang (b.1971, Seoul) has developed an expansive body of work since the 1990s and is a professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, her alma mater. She has participated in international art exhibitions including the Venice Biennale and Documenta 13. An acclaimed contemporary artist, Yang’s work has been exhibited and acquired by renowned museums including the Centre Pompidou, Museum Ludwig, MoMA, and Tate Modern. In 2018, she won the Korean Culture and Arts Award (presidential commendation) and was the first Asian female artist to be honored with the Wolfgang Hahn Prize.

Director of the MMCA Youn Bummo notes that “Yang’s oeuvre is lauded for its powerful aesthetics as well as an intellectual depth that ventures beyond simplistic or didactic readings.” Yang has interpreted a broad spectrum of cultural references that encompass historic figures, events, and natural and societal phenomena using her mesmerizing yet rigorous visual languages. By dislodging these unfamiliar references from the chronology of linear time and reframing them, her works enable viewers to consider the present anew. Mass-produced commodities and labor-intensive processes are simultaneously employed in many of her pieces.

The mode of Yang’s work is essentially inclusive by implying layers of multiplicities. She adopts sociocultural approaches in dealing with notions such as domesticity and craft, and chooses mysticism over modernist rationalism, developing her own abstract methodology based on geometric modulations. Notions pertaining to culture, civilization, eras, and time are questioned and reconfigured within her works. While world history has been compartmentalized through geopolitics since modernism, Yang proposes to reconsider this fragmentary and hegemonic perspective in a reflective manner. Mobilizing abstract parameters such as grids and orbits she attempt to envision the world overlap, reflect, and multiply as a non-hierarchic kaleidoscope to overcome boundaries. The artist’s unique matrix of diagrams mutate the physical spaces of the museum’s architecture into a complexity of perspectives.

A new sculptural ensemble, Sonic Domesticus uses household objects to engage with “domesticity,” a longstanding subject of artistic inquiry. Amplified, expanded, and transformed to anthropoid scale, the everyday objects are imbued with the metaphoric and speculative presence of human life. Other new works presented in this exhibition are a digital mural and a large-scale advertising balloon installation thematizing natural phenomena, which extends her previous exploration of immaterial sensorial elements.

A large-scale venetian blind installation, Silo of Silence—Clicked Core, an approx. ten-meter-tall kinetic sculpture will be presented in Seoul Box, which represents the recent development in Yang’s blind installations since its inception over fifteen years ago.

MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2020 will be held at MMCA Seoul from Tuesday, 29 September 2020, through Sunday, 28 February 2021, presenting approximately forty works, which encompass a variety of installations, sculptures, and paintings. Within the framework of this exhibition, a scholarly anthology, “Air and Water: Writings on Haegue Yang 2001-2020”, will be published prior to the exhibition in collaboration with Hyunsilmunhwa, containing over thirty pieces of articles, conversations, and essays. This anthology will offer connoisseurs, academic researchers, and the wider public a comprehensive insight into Haegue Yang’s oeuvre.

Guest UserJanuary 25, 2021