The International Banal

Object Lessons: Haegue Yang writes poetry with household goods by Brian Dillon

- Brian Dillon

AN ART OF EVERYDAY OBJECTS, but without nostalgia - is it possible? Since the early 2000s, the South Korean artist Haegue Yang has been making work that among other things - a persistent reflection on movement and exile, a lightly worn phenomenology of presence and mobility, an unusually deft attitude to engaging local or Indigenous ideas and craft - seems to answer that question with an energetic 'Yes'. In 'Leap Year', her 2024 retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London, and 'Lost Lands and Sunken Fields', a new show at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Yang through sculpture, text, video, photography and more looks at quotidian, often domestic things with a sidelong perspective trained by a life overseas. This gaze takes delight in the particularities and repetitions of the material world and, while it sometimes invokes painful episodes, collective or individual, it is never melancholic, never treats objects as ghosts or memorials. Instead, filled with flair and promise, they wait to chime into being like the small bells that are everywhere in Yang's work.