CI08 Interview with Haegue Yang

Carnegie Museum of Art

2008

From the Carnegie Museum of Art: "Haegue Yang's art resists a defining medium, engaging instead with a range of means, from wall drawing to books, sculpture, installation, moving image, and photography. The oblique self-analysis that Yang uses as both strategy and substance in her "placeless" art is symptomatic of someone who has lived for many years outside of her native country and whose life and work entail the high-mobility and in-transit condition common to many contemporary artists operating internationally. This acute sense of provisional belonging—being at home in what is foreign and feeling foreign in what is home—lends Yang's work a hair-trigger sensitivity for the inflections of quotidian experience as well as public and private territories. She has described her practice in terms of a poetic activism. Three Kinds (2008) employs commonplace objects such as venetian blinds, lights, and mirrors to create an atmosphere of dramatic intimacy. Though the specific point of conceptual departure remains obscured—Yang relates this and similar installations to abstract portraits of various individuals from Asian and European history—the interaction of the elements might be seen as a stand-in for human relations."