Haegue Yang: Leap Year

The Hayward Gallery presents Leap Year, the first major survey of the internationally celebrated Korean artist Haegue Yang.

Haegue Yang’s work spans a vast range of media – from paper collage to performative sculpture, immense sensorial installations and famously, a mesmerising installation made of dozens of Venetian blinds.

Featuring major new commissions and productions, the exhibition also spotlights key works from some of Yang’s most notable series, including Light Sculptures and Sonic Sculptures.

Talking to Ocula magazine, Yang explained that she sees her practice as “something actual, something to experience, not necessarily to understand”.  For this intriguing survey show, she says “I deliberately unfocused my eyes to obtain the hidden 3D vision of my own practice, which is a rare, perfect occurrence like a leap year”.

Yang’s work brings together visual and sensory experiences through installation, sculpture, collage, text, video, wallpaper and sound. Her wide-ranging inspiration draws on East Asian traditions and folklore, modernism, contemporary art history and nature while the techniques and materials used are just as eclectic including everything from drying racks and light bulbs to pom poms and hanji (Korean paper).

Known for constructing ‘multisensory environments that encourage perception beyond the visual’ her exhibitions often become immersive experiences, exploring issues of labour, migration, and displacement.