Sadong 30
August 19 - October 8, 2006
Installation in an abandoned house in Incheon, South Korea

Showing the piece:

Sadong 30
2006

Light bulbs, strobes, chains of lights, mirror, origami objects, drying rack, fabric, fan, viewing terrace, cooler, bottles of mineral water, chrysanthemums, garden balsams, wooden bench, wall clock, fluorescent paint, wood piles, spray paint, IV stand

Dimensions variable

Courtesy of the artist

Installation view of Sadong 30, Incheon, South Korea, 2006
Photo: Daenam Kim

Sadong 30 by Marina Vishmidt

The idea of an abandoned house ‘persisting in its own absolute time,’ (1) a house ‘abandoned because it cannot be explained’ (Haegue Yang, 2006) (2) introduces another variable into Yang's displacement methods. Rather than importing domestic furniture into art spaces or circumscribing art's display structures as art in those spaces, the movement now leads back to a decrepit house in the burgeoning Seoul suburb of Incheon.

The first step of the movement is putting the forlorn situation of the house up for display: the former home as a stage set for homelessness. Home is where homelessness is domesticated, and when the home is abandoned, it displays this homelessness. The house used to belong to Yang’s maternal grandparents, making for an even more intimate de-domestication. The second is a kind of re-domestication which preserves rather than banishes the uncanniness of such an effort in such a space. This happens with the introduction of small, meticulously sited objects common to Yang’s display grammar (origami, light fixtures, clothed drying racks) into the crumbling interiors of a house shut off from outside contact long enough to turn in on itself. The conditions of visibility and access if this is to be approached as an artwork cannot be ignored; the house is ‘barely held together by its outer walls’ 3 and entering such a structure may give pause to the meeker among visitors. The house as a site emphasizes the notion of ‘absolute time’ very concretely; it may be said to be out of time, locked up and forgotten at least until such time as the land it stands on draws attention from developers. However, it may also be said to be out of exchange, a place of non-equivalence that ‘squanders’ time, use, and purpose, and is barred from circulation.

Sadong 30 (2006) can be inscribed into the oblique trajectory of Yang’s attitude to space, which pulls in two main directions, a transient one and a static one. Sadong 30 dwells more on time and sees space as its ruined remainder. The video trilogy Yang released in 2004 and 2006 (Unfolding Places, Restrained Courage, and Squandering Negative Spaces) falls on the ‘transient’ side of things, as it groups meditations on homelessness and displacement. It comprises observational transits through many cities (one in South Korea and a number in Europe and Brazil) overlaid with voiceovers written by Yang and narrated by others which talk about the existential dread and power of perpetual motion. The slide-piece Dehors (2006) and its wall-mounted forerunner Flat Utopia (2004), conjures the static idyll of real-estate ads for luxury developments Yang found in the newspaper. These full-color spreads, inevitably mimicking the moloch-itecture of Metropolis, are photographed with light shining behind them, so that the resulting slide shows both the advertisement and the other side of the paper. Out-of-field (dehors) of the fantasy, life goes on and it is the shabbiness and mundanity of this life which let us be enthralled by these fantasy projections of our own perfect, alienated activity, but which can also fatally undermine their hold.

1. Hyunjin Kim, ‘To encounter the house of Sa-dong, persisting in its own absolute time,’ in: Sadong 30, exh. cat. Incheon, Korea, Berlin 2006.
2. Haegue Yang, script for Squandering Negative Spaces, Single Channel Video Projection, Brazil, 2006 (DVD, ca. 28 min., sound, color, voice-over: David Michael DiGregorio [English]).
3. Hyunjin Kim (note 1).

(Exerpt from Haegue Yang: Arrivals, Catalogue raisonné, edited by Yilmaz Dziewior with contributions by Anders Kreuger, Yilmaz Dziewior and commentaries on works by Marina Vishmidt, Walther König Buchandlung, Köln, 2015, pp. 213.)

 

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