THE WORLD CAN BARELY CONTAIN Haegue Yang. Since the mid-1990s, the Korean artist has navigated the streets of Seoul and the boulevards of Berlin with equal ease. Her installations, for which she is best known, follow suit. Although composed of such quotidian objects as venetian blinds and packing crates, they likewise move through a vast array of references, from Marguerite Duras to Marcel Broodthaers. Yang’s latest exhibition, too, was both a journey and a return, since the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis was the first US institution to show her works, in 2007.

Featuring a succinct collection of mostly small-scale pieces made in the last few years, the show lacked something in size and pomp but more than made up for this in the timeliness and scope of its tacit message. Yang poses nothing less than the problem of formalism: What is its place within today’s supposedly globalized art world, which prides itself precisely on having overcome the reductivism associated with formalist methods of producing and understanding art?

This question was immediately presented at the beginning of the show by Three Kinds in Transition, 2008, a looped projection featuring 473 slides of a polyhedron that morphs into various permutations. The projection is a textbook demonstration of topology, the subfield of mathematics concerned with spatial properties and transformations. Here Yang wields a formalism that is not limited to a superficial, Greenbergian privileging of the optical but instead is marked by a sustained attention to morphology, to structure.

Quasi MB—In the Middle of Its Story, 2006–2007, was imagined by Yang as a conversation between herself and Broodthaers. In each diptychlike composition, missives that have been drenched, stained, or otherwise damaged are paired with pristine sheets clearly reproducing the text of the adjacent letter. The contact between paper, ink, and water unfurls in strange ways, from painterly explosions of ink to letters so tattered they might disintegrate on contact. The juxtaposition induces concentration on visible form; one composition even goes so far as to instruct: THIS WRITING IS NOT TO BE READ. IT IS, RATHER, TO BE SEEN.

If these works make a case for the primacy of form, one of the less convincing pieces at the Walker was DIN A4/DIN A3/DIN A2 Whatever Being, 2006–2007, a suite of wall sculptures that resembles nothing so much as a row of white monochromes attempting to wrench themselves free from a vast expanse of wall. The works’ painted fiberboard corners do their utmost to convince us of their plasticity. Among the least successful of Yang’s works, this literal series takes too much to heart the proposition of the monochrome as readymade.

More compelling was Yearning Melancholy Red, 2008, the exhibition’s finale-cum-showcase. Intended as a reflection on the complex life of French writer-filmmaker Duras, this large installation tries hard to immerse the viewer in a multisensory experience, one that pays as much due to the Hélio Oiticica of the 1960s as it does to the Duras of 1940s Vichy France. The installation consists of a room bathed in a miasma of red generated by rotating spotlights and heat from infrared lamps. Yang also makes ample use of one of her signature materials, the venetian blind. Arranged in pinwheel configurations throughout the space, each screen of blinds radiates from an implied center like blades on a fan, cleverly echoing a set of fans nearby. Like Oiticica’s Grande núcleo (Grand Nucleus), 1960–66, the work is scaled to human proportions. The sprawling blinds, however, force the viewer to the edges of the gallery space. And despite being open or semiopen, the blinds do more to conceal than reveal. Yearning Melancholy Red is at once intrusive and exclusionary.

In Yang’s hands, then, a darker view of form emerges; the utopian pretensions accorded to form by artists like Oiticica give way to an air of decided hostility. Yang seemingly tries to right the balance in this installation by including a drum set that, when played, controls the room’s spotlights. Viewers are invited to play the drums—but as is the case with so many interactive works, this information can only be gleaned from a pamphlet or a helpful guard. Tucked away in a back corner, the drum set ultimately appears as an object to be contemplated in silence rather than raucously played by an involved audience.

Seen against the artist’s fluid traversals between different cultural spaces and times, the seriousness of Yang’s approach bespeaks a more pessimistic view of the world. In its studied, almost ritualistic attention to the possibilities of form, her art asks whether such attention is in fact the only viable means, other than explicit vocalizations of cultural difference, for a nonwhite and non-Euro-American artist to attain global status.

No work evokes this question better than Dehors, 2006. A seven-minute slide projection showing a continuous procession of Korean newspaper advertisements touting various real estate developments, it is most striking for what it purges from view: Korean text. Yang blackens the characters, severing the images from their context. In contrast to the vivid, jewel-like colors used to entice readers into buying high-priced real estate, the black stands out, so much so that the act of erasure becomes the subject of the work. Paradoxically enough, however, the blackened text also makes visible the text printed on the reverse page of the newspaper, quite literally bringing matters of national and cultural context back into the picture. Dehors may mean “outside,” but as Yang demonstrates, specters of nation and culture rarely, if ever, leave the building.

Joan Kee is an assistant professor in the department of art history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.