Haegue YangFlat Works 2004-2024

Haegue Yang: Flat Works 2004-2024 surveys two decades of the artist’s two-dimensional explorations, including so-called Lacquer Paintings, Hardware Store Collages, Trustworthies (abstractions made from security envelopes, sandpaper, and more), wallpapers, Spice and Vegetable prints, and finally Mesmerizing Mesh (cut and folded paper collages based on international shamanistic practices). Aspects of these series have been exhibited in the past, but never comprehensively in order to consider their cumulative impact and the throughlines across each project. 

One of the most important artists working today, Yang is best known as a sculptor and installation artist. Nonetheless, she considers her two-dimensional investigations as essential to her creative development. A fundamental recognition of these series is that “flatness” registers a “collapse” of the three-dimensional world as image. The aesthetics of these investigations range from minimalist and discrete to maximalist and engulfing. The exhibition proposes to redefine Yang’s contributions through stunning and revelatory exploration of her evolving “flat” projects, with a “wallpaper” covering the entry to The Arts Club’s historic Mies van der Rohe staircase and newly conceived apparatuses for viewing and displaying Mesmerizing Mesh. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essay by curator and scholar Orianna Cacchione, Ph.D. She explains, “The flat works are not flat at all, they are sites of compression, paradoxically revealing a depth of space. For Yang, flattening is a “synonym for abstraction” and this abstraction acts across dimensions to infiltrate and deconstruct ways of knowing in contemporary society.”

Haegue Yang (b. 1971, Seoul) lives and works between Berlin and Seoul. She serves as Vice-Rector of the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, where she also graduated as Meisterschüler in 1999. Spanning a vast range of media—from collage to kinetic sculpture and room-scaled installations—Yang’s work links disparate histories and traditions in a visual idiom all her own. The artist draws on a variety of craft techniques and materials, and the cultural connotations they carry: from drying racks to venetian blinds, hanji paper to artificial straw. She is known for her multisensory environments that activate perception beyond the visual, creating immersive experiences that treat issues such as labor, migration and displacement from the oblique vantage of the aesthetic.

A recipient of the Wolfgang Hahn Prize in 2018 and the 13th Benesse Prize at the Singapore Biennale in 2022, Yang has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at museums around the world, including HAM, Helsinki (2024); National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2023); Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2023); SMK – The National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2022); Tate St Ives (2020); MoMA, New York (2019); The Bass, Miami Beach (2019); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2018); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016); Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2011); and the South Korea Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), among others. This October, she will have a major survey exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London.