Haegue Yang: ‘Leap Year’

The everyday has radical poetic potential in Haegue Yang’s work. The South Korean artist looks at blinds, envelopes, drying racks and paper and she sees dance, sculpture and movement.

You enter this show through a curtain of clanging metal bells to be greeted by laundry drying racks, all stacked and twisted and draped with lightbulbs. Abstract images on the wall are made out of collaged graph paper and envelopes, big movable sculptures are made of straw, Venetian blinds, fluorescent lightbulbs. A bundle of her stuff out of storage is piled into some kind of structure. Yang improvises everyday objects into sculptures, drawings, into art.

By the time you see her shrine-like compositions made of origami paper and big creatures made of straw, you realise that Yang is trying to relate the everyday and the domestic to ideas of the ritual, the historic and the sublime. It’s a quest to find spiritual meaning in the drudgery of daily life.

This thought is expressed best in the straw beings and in the upstairs galleries, where sound, scent and video combine. Venetian blinds are draped over sinks and lightbulbs, making domestic minimalist sculptures. The best work combines a concerto by Korean contemporary classical composer Isang Yun with a huge structure made out of blinds. This is when the romantic, radical poetry of everyday things comes most alive, though that may be more due to the angular, emotive music than the sculpture.

Yang’s ideas are nice enough, but too well trodden and too quietly and subtly expressed to actually say anything meaningful or elicit much of an emotional response. It just doesn’t feel like it’s about that much, or saying that much.

Sometimes a pile of stuff is just a pile of stuff, and sometimes the domestic isn’t sublime or poetic, it’s just a bit boring.