‘Haegue Yang: Strange Attractors’ by Imelda Barnard
Haegue Yang’s show at Tate’s Cornish outpost is beguilingly bizarre, writes Imelda Barnard
Haegue Yang: Strange Attractors
Until 3 May 2021 Tate St Ives
The title of the South Korean artist Haegue Yang’s exhibition at Tate St Ives is ‘Strange Attractors’ – and that first word is especially apt. Various hairy-looking anthropomorphic sculptures are dotted around the main gallery and the space is interrupted by two large wooden geometric structures. On one wall is a digital print that presents visions of catastrophe: lightning bolts, crashing waves and a red sea suggest the end is near. The title of the show is in fact drawn from a scientific concept relating to chaos theory and so, from the outset, Yang is upfront about how the idea of unpredictability drives her visually complex universe. But for all the show’s baffling conceptualism, there is humour here too: one of the works is joyfully titled The Intermediate – Tilted Bushy Lumpy Bumpy.
The Intermediate sculptures first appeared around 2015 when Yang began using woven straw to explore traditional arts-and-crafts techniques. This marked something of a departure given her inclination towards manmade objects – think light bulbs, drying racks and venetian blinds – yet her use of artificial rather than natural straw continued Yang’s interest in modern methods of production and served to separate these objects from the traditions of ‘folk’ art. Look beyond the comically festive nature of two of the Intermediates on show here – one is adorned with pink-and-white plastic pom-poms – and it’s clear that Yang is making a serious point about the value we ascribe to certain objects, irrespective of the time or effort or money that has gone into their creation. The handmade decorative elements also give these otherworldly objects a ritualistic quality, the forms themselves emerging out of Yang’s research into shamanic and pagan practices in both the East and West.
Elsewhere, shiny structures made from nickel- and brass-plated bells invoke the use of such instruments in ritual or religious ceremonies. These Sonic Half Moons (2014–15) dangle from the ceiling at different heights like futuristic jellyfish, yet when activated by the viewer, they spin and jangle in a mesmerising ceremonial dance between light and sound. There’s a much more obvious sacred motif in Mundus Cushion – Yielding X (2020), stitched cushions that are propped on a wooden support and which are inspired by the hassocks and pews of the Church of Saint Senara in Zennor, not far from St Ives. Yang’s abstract embroidered kneelers feature words such as ‘Twilight’, ‘Orbit’, and ‘Eclipse’ in an evocation of astronomical phenomena. But for all her sense of the elemental and archaic, Yang is not removed from the modern, technological world: another cushion declares ‘Launch’, below which sits the generic triangular ‘play’ symbol used for media files.
The impact of the Cornish setting is also felt in Yang’s site-specific wallpaper work, Non-Linear and Non-Periodic Dynamics (some titles are funny, others less so), which emerged from the artist’s tour in 2018 of the West Penwith coast. Biblical in its depiction of catastrophic weather, it speaks more obviously to today’s climate emergency – although, in Yang’s work, different times and places seem to co-exist. For her recent show at the Bass, she created a wall piece that drew on the museum’s precarious location in Miami Beach. Swirling palm trees and aerial views of Floridian mansions in the grip of a hurricane suggest a world out of control – and one unmoored from the bonds of community or place that are so integral to human survival. The title of Yang’s Tate exhibition is again relevant here: the term ‘strange attractors’ is associated with the meteorologist Edward Lorenz, whose research judged that weather systems are largely unstable, chaotic and subject to the slightest shifts.
Lorenz is not the only historical figure to inform Yang’s work. At the entrance to this exhibition, she has curated a small display featuring works by Li Yuan-chia, Naum Gabo and Barbara Hepworth in an attempt to connect disparate modernist practices. That these latter two figures lived and worked near each other in St Ives is well known; less familiar is Chinese-born Li’s move to Cumbria, where he established the LYC Museum & Art Gallery (which Yang visited in 2018), exhibiting the works of numerous artists including Hepworth and Gabo. This trio also appear in the form of three new works that combine Yang’s sonic sculptures and Intermediates – weird animalistic hybrids made of bells and what looks like black plastic fur. Sonic Intermediate – Parameters and Unknowns after Li (2020; Fig. 3) includes a broomstick, a motif borrowed from Li’s enigmatic photographic self-portrait from 1993, in which he hides his face under a blanket while holding an upturned broom.
In previous works, Yang has drawn on other leading 20th-century figures, among them Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Marguerite Duras, and she has acknowledged her urge to personalise historical artists and events, and to animate domestic objects. The drying rack – which she began using in 2006 – appears in another gallery here, draped in light bulbs and cords in a delicate counterpoint to the furry creatures just beyond (Fig. 2). The action of folding we associate with these banal objects (which is deliberately disrupted by the wires) and the shadows cast by the light are echoed in three works made by flipping three-dimensional origami shapes across paper and using spray paint to capture their landings. As portraits of absence, they are eerily beautiful. Similar geometric shapes appear in Trust worthies (a series started in 2010) – two collaged compositions on graph paper inspired by Cornwall and featuring images of domestic objects such as mops, buckets and taps (Fig. 1).
Included in Yang’s current installation at MoMA (she is a prolific maker) are red handles fixed at random points to the walls, and her Tate show also incorporates wall-affixed handles inspired by the ‘enneagram’ model of the human psyche. For Yang, handles represent points of interaction between one space and another (note also the word ‘Intermediate’ as something situated between two points); in a similar vein, the two architectural interventions that disrupt our pathway in the main gallery mimic the patterns of the binakol cloth, a Filipino textile that uses interlocked geometric designs to conjure the waves of the sea and which is said to provide a barrier against malevolent spirits. Strange and chaotic it might be, but in holding together so many contradictory ideas, Yang’s exhibition at Tate St Ives is very much a gateway to another world.