Voice and Wind
Solo Exhibition at New Museum, New York, USA
October 20, 2010 - January 23, 2011
Installation view of Voice and Wind, New Museum, New York, 2010
Photo: Benoit Pailley
Exhibited Work
Series of Vulnerable Arrangements–Voice and Wind, 2009
Press Release
Yang’s work is marked by a particular preoccupation with the coexistence of formalism and emotion,
determination and meandering. She has created meditative, striking installations at the 2006 São Paulo Biennial,
sala rekalde in Bilbao, and REDCAT in Los Angeles, in which man-made sensorial stimuli enhance an experience
of space and time. For Yang’s installation at the New Museum, industrial fans placed within the gallery will
generate wind at various intervals, altering both the stability of the blinds as suspended barriers and the
movement of visitors through the space. Scent atomizers integrated in and around the system of blinds will
infuse the installation with a subtle olfactory experience, calling upon the visitors’ subjectivity as a key element
in the definition of the space. Flooded with natural light, Series of Vulnerable Arrangements—Voice and
Wind (2009) will evoke shadows of places and experiences not physically present. As in her earlier works,
Yang introduces electricity as an invisible connection between objects, people, and ideas, and as the source of
artificial approximations of sensual experiences “that conjure other places, other people, comfort, distress,
something familiar, perhaps something profoundly forgotten,” writes Eungie Joo, curator.
In Series of Vulnerable Arrangements—Voice and Wind, as in other related installations, Yang employs
commercially-manufactured venetian blinds as a kind of imperfect spatial boundary, easily transgressed
visually, aurally, and physically. For this installation, Yang chose a custom selection of uncategorizable
colors and patterns that exist at the edge of taste. These functional decorations for the home defy rigid
concepts of design or periodization to emphasize the nonaesthetics of the private sphere, “where the
self is cared for and contemplated, and can be shared in a different way,” says Yang.
“Voice and Wind: Haegue Yang” is curated by Eungie Joo, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education
and Public Programs at the New Museum. Joo also served as Commissioner of the Korean Pavilion at the
53rd Venice Biennial in 2009 for the original presentation of this work in the exhibition “Condensation:
Haegue Yang.”
Haegue Yang (b. Seoul, 1971) received her B.F.A. from Seoul National University, Fine Arts College
in 1994, and her Meisterschüler from Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, in 1999. Her work has been
included in numerous international exhibitions such as the 2006 São Paulo Biennial; the Anyang Public
Art Project 2007; the 55th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh; the 2008 Turin Triennial; “Asymmetric
Equality,” REDCAT, Los Angeles; “Brave New Worlds,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the 53rd Venice
Biennial; and most recently “10,000 Lives,” the 8th Gwangju Biennial, and a solo exhibition at Artsonje
Center, Seoul. In 2011, the artist will present a major solo exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz. Yang lives
and works in Berlin and Seoul.