Haegue Yang: Emergence, the first North American survey exhibition by the acclaimed South Korean artist, opens at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) on Oct. 1, 2020 and runs through Jan. 31, 2021. In addition to the 82 works featured in the exhibition, the AGO has commissioned two new works by the artist.
On view, suspended above the Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Sculpture Atrium, Woven Currents – Confluence of Parallels (2020) is a large-scale installation composed of venetian blinds and LED tubes, inspired by the layered architectural history of the space. Tectonic Undulations – A Fugue for the Great Wilderness (2020), a new wallpaper designed by Yang and American artist and book designer Conny Purtill, will go on view later this year in the AGO’s South Entrance.
Curated by Adelina Vlas, the AGO’s Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Haegue Yang: Emergence will be on view on Level 5 of the AGO’s David and Vivian Campbell Centre for Contemporary Art. A leading artist of her generation, this focused survey of Yang’s artwork includes large-scale installations, sculptures and two-dimensional artworks from the last 25 years, and intentionally resists any kind of chronology. Works from various moments of Yang’s career, from the mid-1990’s all the way to the present, have been assembled and grouped together, in order to prompt new meanings and new readings. The exhibition title, Emergence, refers to a natural, social, and economic phenomenon in which a whole entity exhibits qualities and behaviors that its individual parts do not have on their own.
Addressing historical and contemporary narratives of migration, displacement and belonging, Yang’s rich visual language of everyday materials includes venetian blinds, canned goods, light bulbs, drying racks, knitting yarn and bells. By incorporating sound, light, air, smell, and movement into her works, she transforms our understanding of these objects, creating allegorical figures that resist simple definition, being at once local and global in nature.
On Wednesday, October 7th, curator Adelina Vlas will give an overview of the exhibition via Zoom. For more information and to register for the event, please visit the AGO's website.
Haegue Yang (b. 1971 Seoul) lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Seoul, South Korea. She is a Professor at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt am Main. For the opening of the expanded building of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, MoMA commissioned Yang to create an installation for the Marron Atrium. Handles has been highly praised for its performative power to render and weave seemingly irrelevant historical narratives into a singular immersive, mesmerizing and performative field, and it is on view until November 15, 2020. 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 (13) in Kassel (2012) and the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009) as the South Korean representative as well as in the International Art Exhibition at the Arsenale.
Other solo shows opening this fall are: O2 & H2O at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea; The Cone of Concern at Museum of Contemporary Art and Design Manila, Philippines; and Strange Attractors at Tate St Ives, UK. Yang will also participate in the group show Ground/work at The Clark, Williamstown, MA, USA.
Yang’s work is included in permanent collections such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; M+, Hong Kong, China; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, South Korea; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Canada; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA.

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