Presented as part of the Joan Carlisle-Irving Lecture Series
UBC Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory
12:00 p.m. PDT, Wednesday, October 27, 2021
This virtual event is free and open to the public.
Please register in advance: https://ubc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_BfyaB5BXS02-e522wN3kXg
“Yang has always given weight to exhibitions. In particular, she regards those she generates for public institutions as a major driving force for the dissemination of her politics, aesthetic, and artwork.” —Lynne Cooke
Join us for a conversation with artist Haegue Yang on the occasion of her recent solo exhibition Haegue Yang: Emergence at the Art Gallery of Ontario. This focused survey comprised of eighty-four artworks, including new commissions and large-scale installations, sculptures, two-dimensional works, and video essays created over the past twenty-five years.
Emergence refers to a phenomenon in which a system or entity develops new qualities that are distinct from its individual parts. As the first North American retrospective survey of Yang’s work to date, the exhibition draws attention to the unique features of her practice, while showcasing the contextual relationships between individual pieces and the circumstances of their creation.
During this talk, Yang will discuss her varied practice with a virtual exhibition tour. She will also introduce the brand-new catalogue Haegue Yang: Emergence, which contains essays that help contextualize Yang’s artistic career, and generate new understandings of her transformative contributions to the field of contemporary art.
Haegue Yang was born in 1971 in Seoul, South Korea. Currently, she lives and works in Berlin and Seoul. Her works are known for their eloquent and seductive sculptural language of visual abstraction out of her research on historical figures and events. Yang has participated in major international exhibitions including the 16th Istanbul Biennial (2019); the 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018); La Biennale de Montréal (2016); the 12th Sharjah Biennial (2015); the 9th Taipei Biennial (2014); Documenta XIII in Kassel (2012); and the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009).
Selected recent solo exhibitions have been held at Tate St Ives (2020), the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2020), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2020-21), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (2020), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); South London Gallery (2019); MO.CO. Panacée, Montpellier (2018), and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2018). Recipient of the 2018 Wolfgang Hahn Prize, Yang’s work is included in permanent collections such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; M+, Hong Kong; Tate, London; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Remai Modern, Saskatoon; The Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
Image courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, 2018. Photo by Abigail Enzaldo.