A recurring image in Haegue Yang’s first major UK show is the strangely humanlike figure of a clothes-horse: with protruding ‘arms’ outstretched, it crops up as contorting, childlike, and even maternal. Yet it would be misleading to view Yang’s work merely as an attempt to vivify her materials. The knitted coverings worn by various tin cans in Can Cosies may hint at the foods they contain, just as the objects hung off yet more clotheshorses in Non-Indépliables suggest differing personalities. But focusing on these superficial features masks Yang’s more complex efforts to make her sculptures seem both knowable and unfamiliar.
The sculptures exhibited in ‘Teacher of Dance’ often work best when approached obliquely, treating them as part of the fabric of the building itself. Suddenly, initially inscrutable works come to life – Manteuffelstrasse 112 benefits particularly, a series of lightbulb-filled boxes covered by Venetian blinds (both recurrent materials). Modelled on the radiators in Yang’s Berlin apartment, these prove largely unremarkable when considered individually. Yet when seen out of the corner of the eye (just where ‘real’ radiators would be expected), their bounded play of light, shade, lines and shapes combine, blooming satisfyingly on the wall. A newly commissioned Venetian-blind installation for the Piper Gallery is similarly transformed against the gallery skylight, changing from stark and unwieldy to an enveloping, even graceful object when viewed on the move from directly below.
If the show’s ‘white box’ environment feels a less fertile setting for Yang’s work than the site-specific environments she has used previously, her film Doubles and Halves goes some way towards redressing this. Shot mainly in the run-down Seoul suburb of Ahyun-Dong, the film is accompanied by a repeated monologue meditating abstractedly on the lives of its inhabitants. Given the unoriginal premise and uninflected, observational tone, Yang distinguishes herself in varying the film’s imagery just enough to ensure it remains compelling. A number of the objects Yang dwells on elsewhere – lightbulbs, structures covered in incongruous sheeting – are also prominent here, and afterwards it’s hard not to picture Ahyun-Dong’s seemingly depopulated buildings when examining Yang’s Venetian blinds. The result is that the film almost becomes an internalised backdrop to the rest of the show, operating, like its own monologue, as a set of preoccupations cumulatively playing off the images at hand.
The importance of movement – across the gallery or, shot by shot, across Ahyun-Dong – to achieving a transient moment of illumination (a pregnant term given Yang’s liking of lightbulbs) in turn reflects the ideas of the Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, the ‘teacher of dance’ of the show’s title. This is perhaps encountered most explicitly in the companion pieces to the Piper Gallery installation. Also employing Venetian blinds, these can be entered into and wheeled around, forming an unexpectedly light and mobile exoskeleton on the edge of vision. Standing beside the structures the effect is a hostile one, the blinds suggesting windows looking neither inside nor out. Yet within the structures this paradox is overcome, imbuing a feeling of resolution.
Such resolution is, however, hard to come by across the show as a whole: overall, Yang’s concerns are abstract ones which remain difficult to bring out in sculpture and engender variable results. Her visions of Ahyun-Dong in turn cast a long shadow, perhaps as the film’s (albeit elusive) internal logic is still starkly presented. Yet it’s also refreshing that Yang avoids overtheorising, preferring her sculptures to shoulder the burden of communication despite their economy. Take the time, and it’s possible to be won over by her quiet, unhurried and understated approach in addressing difficult and unusual concerns.
‘Teacher of Dance’ is showing at Modern Art Oxford until 4th September
