When Heg Yan was in Germany a few years ago, he became fascinated by the local hardware store and, specifically, its catalog. She cut it up to create a series of collages, including rolls of brown wrapping paper arranged in star-shaped symmetrical patterns. That’s it. Hayward’s retrospective of the 53-year-old Korean man has much to offer. It’s huge, crowded and not at all challenging. None of it makes any sense, and none of it is moving, unless you’re the kind of person who sheds tears watching Blind. “Venetian blinds are a hallmark feature,” says wall text describing Yang’s work. “She is particularly attracted to its sloping slats.”
All About Slats… Sonic Dress Vehicle – Hulky Head, 2018. Photo: Mark Brower/Courtesy of the artist and Hayward Gallery.
In some installations, these slanted slats cover the sides of the light box. This seemingly neutral work is titled 5 Rue Saint-Benoit and reads as an allusion to the Parisian home where novelist Marguerite Duras lived as a member of the Resistance during World War II. , you will be shocked. If you look again, you’ll see that one of the blindfolded boxes is painted to look like a tricolor. Otherwise, heavy cultural references will be left hanging in the void without meaning, but that’s not all.
In a new commissioned work, light illuminates an array of Venetian blinds receding into the distance like a toy theater landscape, choreographed to Korean composer Yoon Yi-sang’s Double Concerto for oboe, harp, and small orchestra. Shine. Elsewhere, notes written on metal plates musing about Primo Levi and the Holocaust, George Orwell shooting elephants and Edward Said about Palestine, were chopped up until they lost meaning. He was moving around.
Perhaps that’s the point. Big ideas, grand stories, and flair of all kinds cannot withstand the information overload and global complexity of today’s world. When you go to the show, it’s as crazy as a huge city. Traditional bells tinkle and carvings move about. Or at least it rolls around while being pushed on casters by a carving press expert. These sculptures are colorful, intricate matte masses, sprouting spiky knots, vines, and flowers that move over precisely marked abstract floor paintings. What exactly does this mean? Please look for me.
Rather, on some level it is very easy to say what it is. That’s the “crazy complexity of our world.” Or, as Hayward puts it, the “hybridity” and “interconnectedness” of modern life. The problem is that it is simply a fact that we live in a richly stratified and interconnected reality. Everyone knows this. Yang’s art evokes nothing more than the confusion and fun we experience when going to the store.
Blind Alley… Starcross Rendezvous at Yun, Heg Yan, 2024: Leap Year. Photo: Mark Brower/Courtesy of the artist and Hayward Gallery.
She makes extensive use of collage, a technique invented by Picasso and developed by the Dadaists to suggest the fragmentation of modern life. But her collages are spotless, without any harshness or randomness to shock or unsettle. It’s neat and stylish. One series uses cut-up envelopes to create shapes that are rounded on one end and sharp on the other. They are displayed above wall-sized black-and-white photographs of sunny suburban landscapes called “Poetics of Displacement.”
With a title this big and important, it’s easy to interpret, but hard to care about. Of course, the comet cutout represents the global migration of people, and the photograph speaks of “migration” in the same way that the sculpture on wheels suggests our many movements ( That’s what the title says; the photo itself says nothing.) In another gallery is an installation called “Storage Piece,” in which her belongings are packed into boxes. It’s not an emotional story of modern life, but just a dishwater-dull image of today’s universals. Who cares when you depict the modern world in such a cool and conceptual way?
Cute but boring…Haegue Yang: Intermediates series at Leap Year, 2014-2018. Photo: Mark Brower/Courtesy of the artist and Hayward Gallery.
Jan gives us hints about her own life. Her first exhibition, held in her grandparents’ old empty house, caused a lot of buzz. Perhaps you needed to be there. But as memorialized here, it looks like a nice light in a decaying house. The curators clearly think they’re telling the story of a great artist, but I don’t see anything that justifies that respect.
In fact, many of Yang’s works are beautiful. Therefore, the best way to enjoy the show is probably with cool ideas for decoration. Beneath all the fuss about interconnectedness, all the Levi and Orwell quotes, a very gentle artist struggles to break free. You will notice this when you reach the vegetable print. When she’s not pretentious, Jan enjoys creating pale patterns using leaves and everyday vegetables. It’s a little bland, but it looks nice. She also creates bright kirigami, which she calls “fascinating meshes,” using intersecting patterns of triangles, masks, and biomorphic shapes. Again, they’re appealing but lack weight or depth.
This art says nothing to me. It never once expresses human pain and longing, touches on the mysteries of existence, never makes us face reality, and without a trace of poetry, it ironically juxtaposes Korean tradition and modern mediocrity. , it’s just playing a game by itself. All you hear is your inner voice saying, “Pull the other end. It has a little jingling bell on it.”
Hayward Gallery, London, October 9th to January 5th
