Detail: Haegue Yang was selected to represent Korea in the Korean Pavilion for the 53rd Venice Biennale.
Haegue Yang works primarily in sculpture, video, and installation. Her practice is engaged with history, human sentiment, lived experience, and memory. Yang's work seeks an emotional relationship to the audience predicated on a kind of vulnerability offered by the artist that in turn relies upon the participation and subjectivity of the viewer. In her video essay, Squandering Negative Spaces (2006), Yang expresses her position through a narrator: "There is a silence, then a vulnerable silence that has a story to it. It is like this, for example: any song that strikes a chord in our heart causes us to worry about its ending. A state where one dares not to listen to a song because of the fear of its ending is a silence, but it is a different kind of silence. I am looking for the state of the vulnerability that includes this very potential sound."
Yang's work is often described as "poetic,"though that perhaps simplifies her investigations. In fact, Yang's work is subtle, contemplative. In her light sculptures and installations, Yang utilizes the invisible source of electricity, made tangible by artificial sources of light, scent, heat, air, and sound, as a metaphor for the potential connections between people and ideas, and across time and history. Because she is engaged with subjectivity and resonance, Yang frequently seeks to extend or expand a particular experience through time.
"Haegue Yang is a compelling artist whose work speaks to a complex struggle for context through the stimulation of human senses and the experience of the viewer. The project for the Biennale is a great opportunity for us to continue our ongoing conversation in the form of an international exhibition that echoes the artist's preoccupations with Europe and Asia," says Eungie Joo. Haegue Yang received her B.F.A. from Seoul National University, Fine Arts College in 1994, and her Meisterschüler from Städelschule Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in 1999. Her works have been exhibited internationally including Anyang Public Art Project 2007; BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht; the 55th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh; Cubitt Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Hamburg; Portikus, Frankfurt; REDCAT, Los Angeles; 2006 Sao Paulo Biennial; the 2008 Turin Triennale; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and most recently, Sala Rekalde, Bilbao. Yang lives and works in Berlin, and Seoul.