
Toronto
“Haegue Yang: Emergence”
Art Gallery of Ontario
317 Dundas Street West
October 1, 2020–January 31, 2021
Curated by Adelina Vlas
On the heels of her recent, atrium-filling installation at the newly refreshed Museum of Modern Art, New York, Haegue Yang yet again flexes her plurimedial wings in this first survey of her work in North America. Spanning the arc of Yang’s robust career from 1994 to the present—and including two new commissions—the exhibition features more than seventy of her installations, sculptures, paintings, photographs, prints, and performances, which engage with histories of art, culture, and science without being subordinate to them. Moving deftly beyond Duchampian tactics of recontextualization, Yang’s works look as if they might have lives and wills of their own—a piquant reminder that the world belongs as much to inanimate things as to their animate counterparts. An extensive monograph, with contributions from Vlas, art historian Lynne Cooke, and the Seoul Museum of Art’s director, Jee-sook Beck, accompanies the show.
— Joan Kee