The two Exhibitionistas friends, contemporary art curator Joana P. R. Neves and art lover Emily Harding examine the unexpectedly sensorial exhibition “Leap Year” by South Korean artist Haegue Yang. How did she accomplish such enchanting aesthetics–and huge sculptural objects–with simple, domestic materials?! Why are they so strange and yet familiar, almost nostalgic? Where do the Korean elements stop and the European interiors begin (Yang lives in Berlin)?
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Yang ‘s exhibition took over the whole space of the Hayward Gallery, and yet her sculptures don’t appear grandiose or even static. So… Did this sensory fest lead one of our hosts to touch a sculpture inadvertently? Maybe. Did the sculptures with domestic elements, albeit repetitive, provide deep feelings? Certainly. But was it the story about Yang’s mum not understanding German bathrooms that touched one of the Exhibitionistas? Perhaps.
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For more information: https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/haegue-yang-leap-year/
Follow Haegue Yang on Instagram: @yanghaegue
Music by Sarturn.
Did the episode stir Art Wonderment memories? Share them via text or voice message.
Created & Hosted by Dr. Joana P. R. Neves, art curator and writer with over 20 years of experience in the contemporary art field. Artistic director of Drawing Now Paris since 2018, she has worked across the industry, from the art market to education. She co-launched the art residency and project space Worlding in 2020. Exhibitionistas’ first year offered exhibition discussions with guest co-host Emily Harding; organically, it grew into a more experimental show exploring art topics, stories and interviews complemented by Joana’s publication Art Thinkosaurus on Substack. She champions ‘Art Wonderment’s’ embrace of complexity against the lure of ready-made opinions. A polyglot, she grew up in Lisbon, studied and lived in Paris, to finally settle in London with her artist husband, four children and two cats.
Find us:
On Instagram – @exhibitionistas_podcast
On Substack (NEWSLETTER: sign up!): Art Thinkosaurus > Exhibitionistas Files
Online: www.exhibitionistaspodcast.com
Do you want to be a guest on Art Etiquette? Reach out: joana@exhibitionistaspodcast.com
Copyright: Joana P. R. Neves, 2024.
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Hi there, Joanna here. Thank you for joining us for
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another exhibitionist this episode dedicated to Leap Year,
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a survey of the South Korean artist Hague Young at the
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Haywood Gallery. Emily and I recorded this
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episode for the 1st and probably the last time during the week,
00:00:28
in the late afternoon rather than in the early hours of a
00:00:32
Sunday. And there is a certain chaotic
00:00:35
energy to it. As Emily and I are morning
00:00:38
people. I don't know if you'll notice
00:00:40
it, but it is the first episode where I lost it and laughed for
00:00:44
what felt like a very long time because it was me who breached
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exhibition etiquette this time. And as Emily rightly pointed
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out, I was the one who dedicated a whole episode last season to
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this very subject. So now my usual reminder for you
00:01:02
to feel the holiday spirit and subscribe to our Patreon page
00:01:06
for less than a latte or a pint. Supporting us is also supporting
00:01:12
those who cannot pay but still want to enjoy the podcast
00:01:15
without ads. It makes a huge difference for
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us because we're an independent podcast and like most of the
00:01:22
ones you listen to, which are part of media platforms, your
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help allows us to grow and to produce even better episodes for
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you. The link to the page is, as
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always, in the show's notes. So go ahead and be Christmassy.
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We're Hanaki. And now let's move on to the
00:01:43
episode. Hi everyone, welcome to
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Exhibitionistas. This is the podcast where we go
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to exhibition so that you have to.
00:01:58
My name is Emily Harding, I'm an art lover and an exhibition
00:02:01
goer. I'm so glad you could join us
00:02:03
for this episode about Haiku Yang.
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She currently has a show called Leap Year taking place at the
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Hayward Gallery in London until the 5th of January 2025.
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So I am not going to bury the lead here and just say go see
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it. And if you can't be in London to
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see this show, check out her work any way that you can.
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You will not regret it. I mean I was just so blown away.
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I mean I can't say that this exhibition like changed my life,
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but by the end I felt like I had traversed like my own interior
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and that I travelled to South Korea so and and and been on
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many travels with her quite frankly.
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But I'm getting ahead of myself. I need to let my lovely Co host
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introduce yourself. Well, hello, Hello, exhibition
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Estas. I am Joanna Pionevis,
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independent writer and curator, artistic Director of Drawing Now
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Paris. And I'm so glad that you are
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this enthusiastic, Emily, because last time I I almost
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thought that we'd lost you. So welcome back.
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Yeah, it's true. I am more enthusiastic about
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this than I was our previous exhibition we visited.
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I think we're going to lose a few friends with the previous
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episode. That's OK.
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So this is the first time we are covering an exhibition at the
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Hayward Gallery, if you can believe it.
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Yeah, I remember that almost a year ago I was so happy to visit
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their show of Hiroshi Sukimoto's work, Japanese conceptual
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photographer. And now we are going to South
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Korea and Germany with the amazing Hague, Young but first,
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as ever. What other cultural things have
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you been delving into, Emily, this week?
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How has your week been? Yeah, well, it hasn't been as
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joyous as visiting at the Hagar Yang exhibition, I got to say,
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given the US election results and doing lots of digesting and
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and thinking about that and all of the developments that are
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taking place. So we're recording this a couple
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weeks after the election results were announced.
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But so I've been doing a lot of thinking, along with loads of
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other people, of course, about, you know, what this kind of
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means. And it, it brought me back to
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the work of Robert Putnam, who some people might have heard of
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the work Bowling Alone. He is a Harvard professor and he
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wrote a paper originally in the late 90s that looked at this
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whole notion of social capital and the fact that the US was
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losing it. President Clinton at the time
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was a big fan of his, and he turned that paper into a book
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called Bowling Alone, which is essentially what you imagine it
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to be. It's like Americans are not
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joining bowling leagues anymore. They're just doing it on their
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own. And that goes for all sorts of
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civic institutions, labor unions, etcetera, civic groups,
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you know, obviously religious institutions that people were no
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longer joining into, you know, living more atomized lives.
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That book Bowling Alone is basically looking at the mid 60s
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to the late 90s where social capital went down.
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When I was working at US at the US Congress, this was like
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required reading in the office that I, that I worked in.
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It was like. You don't say, really.
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Yeah, yeah. It's really fascinating.
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I mean, if anybody in this is not a, this is not a politics or
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a plug for politics. Yeah, for political books.
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Exactly. Why not?
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Why not? Yeah.
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So he, his research is that now looking at how did we build all
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that social capital in the 1st place.
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So at the end of the 1800s in the US and lots of places, we
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had the Gilded Age. So we had very, very rich people
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and very, very poor people. And that is happening again now.
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That huge gulf between what, you know, people like Elon Musk make
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and, you know, regular folks has only exacerbated massively.
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So he's saying, well, if we're in that same position, what can
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we learn about how we got ourselves out of that Gilded Age
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and, and is it possible to do it again?
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So that's helping me feel a little bit more hopeful about
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the world at least. And could Art perhaps bridge
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that gap? You know what, it could.
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I mean, honestly, it's like, I think the notion of going and
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seeing exhibitions together, seeing art together, talking
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about it together. I mean, obviously podcasts are
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part of that atomized culture, right?
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I mean, people listen to them on their own usually, you know, on
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a run or doing the dishes or what have you.
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But art in and of itself, in the institution of absolutely can
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play a part in bringing people together.
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Listen, he is wishing that art will still play a part in
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American Society from January on.
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And Speaking of bridging the gap, so this is the week where
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Maurizio Catalan's banana was sold for about 6 million or 6
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and a half, $1 so. Newspaper had something on that,
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didn't they? So our our colleague Ben Luke
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just posted on this Instagram an article he wrote five years ago,
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I think, or a few years ago about the the the famous banana.
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So to explain, the piece in itself is a banana, a real
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banana, taped onto the wall with Scotch tape, but not Scotch tape
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with duct tape. And it's called comedian.
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It's a fun pun, obviously, because I had forgotten the
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title and because it kind of came back, I was thinking, huh,
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that's not about title. Actually, it's kind of almost
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elevates such a silly joke, basically.
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And so the person who bought this work is a Chinese crypto
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bro, as Ben Luke puts it. I may be misquoting him, but I
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remember the word bro. And he, he's very happy to, to
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buy it. He's going to eat the banana
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soon as he he installs it or gets it really.
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Because obviously what you get when you buy this is a
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certificate. And we talked about this in the
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last episode. So any, any work that has
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ephemeral elements into it, obviously it's you have to
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remake it all the time. There's a piece by Giovanni
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Anselmo, if I'm not mistaken, in the Pompidou collection that is
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a sort of like a funereal plinth almost in marble with a lettuce
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on top of it. So obviously the lettuce needs
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to be replaced all the time. It's not such a wild thing, you
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know, in the out worlds and as far as materials go, it has been
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done and redone. It's not something new.
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But the fact that it is just a banana and it's duct tape and
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it's such a speculative operation by this point, you
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know, this this comedian piece brings the art world again into
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the general press, which is not great because that's the point
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where whatever you think of Mauricio Catalan, that's where
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we lose people because that's what people take from
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contemporary art, you know? So I was reading in this blog,
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this kind of feminist gossip blog, the banana.
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Go to it. You know, it has nothing about
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feminism, nothing about anything.
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It has no relation whatsoever to the premise of the website and
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the person was writing. And believe it or not, what you
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buy when you buy the banana is a piece of paper and a
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certificate. And it's, you know, for for us
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in the out world is so normal. It's such a normal thing almost
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not for everyone, but maybe in the contemporary art world.
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And so I think that's the point where things are not, you know,
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they're not breached. That's where we lose a lot of
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people. And then they can sort of cast
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it as silly and extreme. And, you know, I mean, people
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are spending all of this money and on that.
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And yeah, exactly. I mean, I feel like this show
00:11:08
that we're going to talk about, though, is the embodiment of
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like what contemporary art can do and really relate to people
00:11:17
because I felt like I related to it so.
00:11:20
Yes, I'm so curious to hear about that, Emily, because, you
00:11:24
know, I've been looking at the reviews of the show.
00:11:27
Time out The Guardian. Really bad reviews.
00:11:30
Really. Yeah, 2.
00:11:32
Stars, one star. Yeah, I'm.
00:11:35
I'm quite surprised and I can't put my finger on it.
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Wow, that's so interesting because I mean, you know, my
00:11:41
husband Peter, he, you know, enjoys art and but he's
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definitely not going with me to every single one.
00:11:47
But this was one that even before I said we were going to
00:11:50
go talk about this, he was like, I want to go to that one.
00:11:54
You know, he just, he was really drawn to it.
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Do you want to talk? You know, just contextualize the
00:12:01
artist a little bit. Hagley Young for our listeners.
00:12:05
Sure, sure. So I'll preface this by saying
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there isn't a ton out there sort of about her upbringing and
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other than the bits you find and the the the catalogue and other
00:12:17
gallery profiles etcetera. But there's lots of interviews
00:12:21
with her and they are well worth it where she sort of talks about
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her work quite exclusively. But what we do know, I mean, so
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she was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1971.
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She grew up with parents that were both writers and labor
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activists. Korea at the time was ruled by a
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military dictator, Park Chung Ki, that took power in 1961, so
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10 years before she was born and was assassinated in 1979.
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Her father was dismissed from his job as a journalist along
00:12:54
with hundreds of others for protesting censorship under the
00:12:59
dictator. And he ended up in construction.
00:13:01
And one of the he, he ended up working in North Africa.
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I think it was Libya and maybe Tunisia, but he ended up working
00:13:12
in North Africa, which a lot of folks from Asian backgrounds did
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at the time, mostly in the Gulf. The Gulf was certainly, you
00:13:21
know, kind of going through a big boom time.
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And I mean, there were millions of of South Koreans in
00:13:27
particular, but folks from across Southeast Asia that were
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there working on construction sites, etcetera, during that
00:13:36
whole construction boom kind of in the 90s, I guess So.
00:13:42
But these themes of her parents, yeah, of political movement, you
00:13:48
know, through their union work, etcetera and displacement are
00:13:54
alive and well in her work and really, really palpable.
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She produced a Commission that honored Korean migrants to the
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Gulf in 2015 that was called Opaque Wind, and it had sort of
00:14:06
an external installation and an internal installation.
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So this means that if you're saying the 90s, so that means
00:14:14
that she grew up in North Africa because she was born in 1971.
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They didn't live there. He went to work there.
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Oh, so he left and so and her mom and her stayed behind in
00:14:29
Korea. That's my I mean, that was the
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general thing that happened because often with those
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arrangements, they don't allow your family to come with you.
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You were there to work and that's it.
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Your. Visa.
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That's brutal. OK.
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Really brutal. I mean, you know, indentured
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servitude is a way to describe it, which is a way to describe
00:14:52
slavery. And I don't know what particular
00:14:54
conditions her father was under, but I mean, you go to Dubai and
00:15:01
all of these kind of, you know, Kuwait or wherever.
00:15:03
And that is the pretty appalling situation that a lot of these
00:15:08
folks are in. When I was working in Iraq,
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there were a lot of people who were working within the Green
00:15:13
Zone that had pretty appalling conditions.
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I mean, but yeah, so I I doubt that their their families would
00:15:20
have been able to join them. Wow, that is brutal.
00:15:24
OK. Yeah.
00:15:25
That's that's a wild experience. OK, they stayed and the dads
00:15:31
left, which may have triggered her imagination of whatever is
00:15:36
beyond and what it is to work outside because she ended up in
00:15:40
Germany, right? Yeah, totally.
00:15:42
Yeah. So she she got her BFA from
00:15:45
Seoul National University and graduated with her master's from
00:15:50
Stratoschuler. I think is how it's pronounced
00:15:53
in Germany. Of course, absolutely perfect
00:15:55
German Emily. Honestly, Low notes.
00:15:58
I went in with confidence, so. Yeah, exactly.
00:16:02
So she's a professor at that university now.
00:16:05
And so is it strange to you, knowing the art world, an artist
00:16:09
much better that she is a, is a university professor?
00:16:15
I mean, is that a? Is that a common thing?
00:16:17
Oh yes. Yes, of.
00:16:19
Course, the bazaar even in Paris, so the Fine Arts school,
00:16:23
like the very famous Fine Arts Fine Arts school in Paris,
00:16:27
they're even teachers or the these professors, they have
00:16:31
studios. So you're studying under the
00:16:35
Annette Massages studio, for example, or in the Annette
00:16:38
Massages studio. And Annette Massages is a huge
00:16:40
artist. So there is this kind of
00:16:43
tradition, I guess. It seems like a sort of, now
00:16:46
that I'm thinking about it, it's almost feels like a remnant from
00:16:50
the olden days when you had the Master and the disciple and you
00:16:55
had Michelangelo, and then you had all the other ones who also
00:16:58
kind of contributed to whatever frescoes they were doing, but it
00:17:01
was Michelangelo's. So of course there's a bit of
00:17:04
that, but then you're starting to yourself, become an artist
00:17:07
and leave the school and then have your own autonomous career,
00:17:11
obviously. But it's not that.
00:17:14
It's not that unusual. In fact, it's very, very normal
00:17:17
that at a certain point artists are rather invited to, to teach
00:17:23
or they want to teach themselves to preserve a certain freedom to
00:17:28
have a steady income. And what, what best thing to do
00:17:31
than to remain in the school and, and kind of be within that
00:17:35
system in a way, you know? Yeah, 'cause I mean, you know,
00:17:40
Philip Guston, obviously when we talked about him, he was he was
00:17:44
teaching as well. And, you know, you think of like
00:17:48
the Bauhaus school. It's like all of the incredible,
00:17:51
you know, artists that were there that were teaching at the
00:17:53
time. But I guess, you know, that I,
00:17:56
I, I sort of categorize that as something historical that
00:18:00
artists did because I'm, I'm in the Hayward Gallery and I'm
00:18:04
looking at the immense body of work and this huge solo show.
00:18:10
And there's part of me that thinks, well, she must be doing
00:18:13
pretty well. I mean, like, like, like, I
00:18:16
mean, there's, you know, there's no way she would need to have a
00:18:21
steady income outside of what she is doing.
00:18:25
But do you, I mean, do you think that and and maybe she loves
00:18:28
teaching, you know, maybe she loves it and that's a different
00:18:31
thing, you know, but it's like, if it's the argument of of a
00:18:35
steady income, is it conceivable that somebody could be of her
00:18:40
stature and still in the art world not have like steady
00:18:44
enough or enough income to survive?
00:18:46
Is that would you say that's true?
00:18:49
That's a very, very good question actually.
00:18:52
And I don't think people realize how precarious sometimes being
00:18:56
an artist is somehow, because in her case, I don't know much
00:19:02
about her gallery exhibitions. She is represented by a very
00:19:05
good gallery, Chantelle Couzelle in Paris.
00:19:09
And this is an international gallery of great status.
00:19:12
But I've never seen an exhibition there, you know, like
00:19:15
these small commercial, let's say, exhibitions that artists
00:19:19
produce for galleries. But looking at her work, think
00:19:25
about it, Emily, even if you live in a palace, how much of
00:19:31
those works could you, I mean, how much could she sell?
00:19:36
You know, in terms of dimension, in terms of there's a thing, a
00:19:41
phenomenon, which is that there's, there's institutional
00:19:45
artists. So artists who really are
00:19:48
interested in producing these incredibly poetic, risque,
00:19:55
almost experimental kinds of works that are not fit.
00:20:00
For other places than big collections such as Pinot that
00:20:05
we talked about in regards to My Kelly, or big institutional
00:20:10
collections such as the Tate, for example, the Tate has a huge
00:20:15
collection. So there's this phenomenon of
00:20:18
artists. Of course, you are very well
00:20:20
paid to do an exhibition like this.
00:20:22
Or you should. She moves around the world and
00:20:27
she does another thing, which is another phenomenon for artists.
00:20:30
It's another source of income which is doing residencies.
00:20:35
So there is this. If you're not attacked, if you
00:20:39
don't have children and, or if your children are older or if
00:20:45
you don't have yet children, there's another way for you to
00:20:48
create and to find ways to produce and to exist, which is
00:20:54
doing residencies. And that's one of the things she
00:20:57
did. And that's one of the things
00:20:58
that actually created one of the works in the exhibition called
00:21:02
Storage Piece. She was moving about and at a
00:21:05
certain point she didn't even have a place to live, let alone
00:21:08
a place to store her work. And therefore she had a huge
00:21:12
problem in her hands because she had a burgeoning career, not a
00:21:17
lot of money, but a lot of invitations to be part of
00:21:20
exhibitions across Europe. So she produced a lot of work.
00:21:24
And when it came back to her, where does she put it?
00:21:27
So, you know, that's and I think you're asking yourself these
00:21:30
questions because this exhibition is so clever that it
00:21:34
talks about how she incorporates what it is to be a creative
00:21:40
person in the world with objects, right?
00:21:44
I mean, we're going to talk about it, but I think that
00:21:46
planted these questions in your mind.
00:21:49
And I, I applaud her for that. That's incredible.
00:21:52
And I applaud you as well because not everyone thinks
00:21:55
about these things. I have been so professional.
00:21:58
What is wrong with me? Sorry, Why am I applauding you?
00:22:03
Help. But she she was pretty
00:22:07
successful from the jump. I mean, she graduated in 1999
00:22:10
and had a first solo exhibition in 2000 in Barbara Vines Gallery
00:22:16
in Berlin. So I mean, and I can imagine
00:22:20
that was a Kraken show. Like I, I tried to find some
00:22:23
stuff on it. I couldn't.
00:22:25
But I. I love your passion.
00:22:28
Yeah, yeah. I mean, she, yeah, she's really
00:22:31
got to me this one. But I mean, and I also, I'll
00:22:35
just say. So she primarily works in
00:22:37
sculpture, prints, collage, installation.
00:22:42
You know, it's kind of an overview and they include ideas
00:22:46
of myths and legends that she grew up with every day growing
00:22:51
up and then articles like very domestic articles as well.
00:22:55
So drying racks, light bulbs, radiators, other appliances.
00:22:59
Venetian blinds are a big one, which I thought she used to
00:23:04
chef's kiss. Beautiful execution there.
00:23:09
But and, and, and her, her works are really sensory.
00:23:13
So movement is a big thing, and the sculptures and installations
00:23:17
move, but there's a light and sound involved where you just
00:23:22
feel like you're moving within it.
00:23:26
And movement is such a big thing for her.
00:23:28
You know, obviously we talked about political movements, the
00:23:32
movement of your person from, you know, being geographically
00:23:37
unbound. I mean, her father was she is.
00:23:40
That's a big part of about of her story, but also just like
00:23:46
physical movement. So the very, very tactile things
00:23:52
she has that that my hands wanted to touch so badly and
00:23:58
move, you know, I mean, she, she works with bells a lot and I
00:24:03
mean some. I was hoping there was a
00:24:04
security issue in this episode as well with you Emily.
00:24:10
I'm sure it might have happened with me.
00:24:13
I'll talk about it later. Teaser.
00:24:15
Teaser. Yeah, that's funny.
00:24:18
But yeah, so that's kind of the the broad, the broad picture of
00:24:23
of kind of how she works. And this exhibition in and of
00:24:26
itself is called, this is another sort of curator question
00:24:29
for you. It's called.
00:24:32
It is called a survey rather than a retrospective Is.
00:24:36
There a difference, yes. So that's a bit of a conundrum
00:24:40
because it's almost means the same thing.
00:24:43
I was going to say it sounds like a distinction without a
00:24:45
difference. But there is a difference based
00:24:49
upon age, which means that, and that's a funny thing with her
00:24:54
because in the beginning of her career she made two things, two
00:25:00
catalogue resumes when she'd only had like five years of
00:25:04
existence as probably including her student years.
00:25:07
And she says in an interview, I was quite aware of the fact that
00:25:11
a catalogue has only was everything you produced.
00:25:14
And I just found the idea really compelling to really look at
00:25:18
everything I had made. And you feel that she has that
00:25:21
kind of mind that she wants to really focus on everything she
00:25:27
produces because her dates, the dates of some of her works are
00:25:31
like 2000 and one, 2021 for example.
00:25:35
And she goes back to some series.
00:25:37
And so it's really interesting because the catalogue resume
00:25:41
would go with the retrospective exhibition or even a posthumous
00:25:45
exhibition. So a retrospective exhibition is
00:25:48
like, you will have had produced so much work, you're revered,
00:25:53
you probably have some lots of prizes, lots of accolades.
00:25:57
And now we're going to go through all your work and all
00:25:59
the phases of your work in your life.
00:26:02
And so certain artists, even when they are of a certain age,
00:26:06
say, I will not say who told me that.
00:26:08
They're like, no, no, no, I don't want to do a
00:26:10
retrospective. You know, like, come on, I'm not
00:26:13
old, you know? And some artists are really
00:26:16
happy to get to that point. Like, OK, I'm going to work on
00:26:19
the retrospective. A survey is more what she likes
00:26:23
to do. I think she really defines even
00:26:26
her process, which is to go over her production, go over what
00:26:30
she's done and organize it in a way by schemes chronologically,
00:26:35
you know, however you want to do it.
00:26:37
And it's kind of overlooking a body of work that doesn't have
00:26:41
to comprise the whole, each element of the of the whole
00:26:45
career, let's say. Right.
00:26:48
OK. And this is that's true for this
00:26:50
one. I mean this one is definitely
00:26:52
thematic and does not go chronologically.
00:26:55
And, you know, looking through some of her other work, there's
00:26:58
clearly a lot that was not included in this necessarily,
00:27:04
but cool. So do you want to like, bring us
00:27:08
into the exhibition? Sure.
00:27:10
I just want to add that she, so in terms of her life, she was
00:27:16
very European at a certain point.
00:27:19
So she moved to Germany, she studied in Germany, she did lots
00:27:23
of residencies all over around the world.
00:27:25
She spent some time in Paris and then she in 2015 she had a big
00:27:32
exhibition in Seoul and Liam Museum.
00:27:36
And so she spent some time in Korea and kind of went back to
00:27:42
Korea, bought a studio that rented a studio there.
00:27:46
And so we established herself from there on between South
00:27:51
Korea and Germany. So there was a process in her
00:27:55
life, as far as I understand, where she left.
00:27:59
She moved out. She became very European.
00:28:02
She deorientalized herself, as she puts it in in an interview
00:28:07
or her work absorbed a lot of things.
00:28:12
She's very curious. She's very interested in
00:28:15
practices across the world. She does lots of investigations
00:28:19
and then going back to South Korea brought back an interest
00:28:25
in certain practices and the politics of those practices that
00:28:30
we're going to talk about later because it does come up in the
00:28:33
exhibition. So I think that's an important
00:28:35
thing to say. So exhibition.
00:28:41
So the Hayworth Gallery is a brutalist building within the
00:28:50
South Bank. I forget South.
00:28:53
Bank, the South Bank kind of complex.
00:28:55
Complex a whole. Bunch there, yeah.
00:28:58
So it's a beautiful complex and a beautiful gallery by the River
00:29:04
Thames, Brutalist architecture, cement, Gray, but of a certain
00:29:11
period. So it's not a sort of
00:29:14
rectangular thing and just a huge gallery.
00:29:18
There's these kind of looks and these nooks and these spaces and
00:29:22
it's a really interesting building and it's interesting as
00:29:26
well because you open a door so you don't it's not like at the
00:29:30
tape where everything's open and you just go through an entrance
00:29:34
that has no door that opens or closes.
00:29:37
And so here and this is to tell you how she thinks of space as
00:29:41
well. It's really interesting what she
00:29:42
does. So when you're so you, The thing
00:29:46
is when you're going to see an exhibition, or maybe it's just
00:29:49
me because I'm an excited little Bunny, but you kind of like go
00:29:53
into the space and you don't think about it.
00:29:54
You just want to see when it be inside.
00:29:57
But she marks the thresholds. So there's someone at the door
00:30:01
who tells you as you are about to open the door.
00:30:05
Well, you can go in. So go in.
00:30:08
But there's an artwork that you can touch.
00:30:11
So it's not this one, it's that one.
00:30:15
And of course I go into a complete panic because if you
00:30:18
give me instructions, I'm super focused.
00:30:22
Hold on, let me write that down. What was that?
00:30:24
OK. Or, or I can touch something.
00:30:30
So I go like, I'm going to get this wrong, you know, and I this
00:30:33
kind of like feeling, you know, doom that I'm just this is not
00:30:38
going to work. So you go and as you went.
00:30:40
So not only do you have that experience, but as you went to,
00:30:43
there's a curtain of little ropes made by bells, by these
00:30:49
circular bells that Jingle. Jingle.
00:30:52
Yeah. Jingle Bells.
00:30:53
Yeah. Kind.
00:30:53
Of Jingle Bells that that produce that jingling sound as
00:30:57
you went to the exhibition. So you're not in the exhibition
00:31:00
and already it's quite the experience and you renounce your
00:31:05
arrival and you feel that you're passing a threshold of some
00:31:08
kind, and then there's a huge installation of.
00:31:13
Sorry, sorry, just to say that I did not get any warning.
00:31:18
No one told me anything when I went in joking.
00:31:21
Was I being pranked? I I went in, I opened the doors
00:31:26
and I saw that, you know, that the curtain of bells in front of
00:31:30
me and I just went to the side and walked around it like I was
00:31:35
like, oh, I'm not. Obviously I'm not supposed to.
00:31:39
Yeah, exactly. I know I've had this experience
00:31:42
before. I don't want to leave in
00:31:43
handcuffs, OK? I know this.
00:31:45
I've been scolded before. Someone went through my phone
00:31:48
and my pictures before. I'm not going to go through this
00:31:50
again. Exactly.
00:31:52
So. So I went around it and it
00:31:54
wasn't until and I just didn't even really consider it at all.
00:31:59
And it wasn't until I sort of got to the other side of the
00:32:01
room and then I saw I heard heard somebody else come in.
00:32:04
It was like Jingle, Jingle, Jingle.
00:32:06
And I was like, no way. I missed that.
00:32:10
So when I go back with Peter, I'm not going to tell him
00:32:12
anything and I want him to just walk ahead of me and.
00:32:17
So I'm really puzzled. Yeah, because I presumed that
00:32:24
so. So.
00:32:25
So you went to let me not get ahead of myself here.
00:32:28
So you enter and there's this beautiful installation with,
00:32:33
with drying racks, these white weird, almost anthropomorphic
00:32:38
shapes and these these cables that have these lamps, these lit
00:32:45
lamps at the end. So these electric cables that go
00:32:48
up to the ceiling, go into the drying racks, go up to the
00:32:52
ceiling again, then go into the drying racks.
00:32:55
There's white cables, black cables, and there's lights, you
00:33:00
know, light bulbs everywhere. And this is really beautiful
00:33:03
thing. And so I spent about 5 minutes
00:33:06
caressing the cables. Amazing.
00:33:10
I'm sorry, Heywood. Calvary, if you listen.
00:33:12
Amazing. I had no idea that they were
00:33:15
talking about the curtain. Because for me.
00:33:18
Wow, so you thought that was the bit you could touch was the
00:33:22
cables? I'm still not sure.
00:33:26
Do you think because listen, listen, can you reason with me
00:33:31
so you have a cut? So because now you're throwing
00:33:35
me off because you have a curtain.
00:33:39
How can you go through a curtain without touching it?
00:33:42
That's what. So so the there's a gap between
00:33:46
the curtain and the wall, and I walked in.
00:33:51
So. And I was just like, Oh well,
00:33:53
clearly I'm not touching. I'm not supposed to touch
00:33:56
anything I've been told before. That you were like hands on.
00:34:01
Yeah, yeah. Shimmy to the side.
00:34:04
Get out the gas. Like, went through the curtain,
00:34:08
touched all the cables, you know, like, Oh my.
00:34:17
Gosh, that's amazing. And nobody was there like
00:34:20
shaking a finger at you. One and I saw people looking.
00:34:26
Was it busy when you were there? Was it like?
00:34:30
I saw people looking at me like. She's like, girl, get a grip,
00:34:37
OK? Together with electrical cord,
00:34:40
Yeah. And also, this is an art
00:34:42
exhibition. What, people don't know how to
00:34:44
behave anymore. Yeah, I just felt these looks.
00:34:48
At a certain point, I was touching a cable.
00:34:50
I was like why am? I Oh my God, And this is the
00:34:55
woman who did an episode on exhibition etiquette.
00:35:01
There we have it. Oh my God, why?
00:35:05
Hilarious. That's how it did make me follow
00:35:09
the cables. It was a completely sensorial
00:35:12
experience because I just followed the cables up and then
00:35:14
was like, oh, so this one goes there, I'm going to touch that
00:35:18
one. And then there's some point I
00:35:19
was like, why? This doesn't add anything to the
00:35:23
experience, you know? Wow.
00:35:26
You were like, yeah, I'm into it, but I'm not really sure what
00:35:29
the Can you imagine if like 'cause those drying racks, these
00:35:34
are like the kind of drying racks you buy at IKEA or
00:35:37
whatever and there's like 1 stacked on top of another and
00:35:42
then those cords are kind of going through it so that the
00:35:44
lights can be in there. So my realization was I hear the
00:35:49
jingling sound and I turn around and I see a child playing with
00:35:53
the the Jingle Bells the the curtain and security looking at
00:35:58
the child. Like really.
00:36:00
And I just think, OK, so maybe they thought I worked at the
00:36:04
Hayward because not to bury the lead again later on, if there's
00:36:11
there's a sort of text on the wall telling you that you can
00:36:14
ask someone from the staff to activate sculptures for you.
00:36:18
So the sculptures are supposed to be that some of them are
00:36:21
supposed to be touched. And I think they probably
00:36:25
thought the security guard probably thought, oh, this
00:36:27
securator I didn't know and or this is a technician that's kind
00:36:31
of kind of checking if everything's fine or I just
00:36:35
know. That's.
00:36:36
Amazing. I shouldn't be saying this
00:36:39
recorded. Because you probably went up
00:36:42
there with like absolute confidence.
00:36:45
Like you pronounced Strader shula.
00:36:48
Yeah, exactly the same way. Same who?
00:36:50
Knows if it's right, but you know what?
00:36:52
I'm doing it. I'm touching this stuff.
00:36:54
But there's, there's also in the exhibition, one of the ones in
00:36:59
that room that you can activate or have the staff activate is
00:37:04
the, there's a giant Jingle Bell rope that kind of goes, it's,
00:37:10
it's pretty substantial. It goes all the way to the top,
00:37:13
really high ceiling kind of has a, you know, kind of a lagging
00:37:19
connecting bit. And then it goes down.
00:37:21
There's a shorter side that hangs down.
00:37:23
And so it's, it's a rope. It's to mimic a rope, which is a
00:37:27
bit of folklore about a couple of kids that were running from a
00:37:31
tiger and they asked. Brother and the sister.
00:37:34
Exactly. And they asked for a rope to
00:37:37
come down that they could climb to like save them.
00:37:40
And they climbed the rope. And when they got up to the
00:37:44
heavens or whatever, the girl became the sun and the boy
00:37:47
became the moon. And that's sort of the origin
00:37:49
story and Korean folklore of the sun and the moon.
00:37:54
But the, there's that sign there that says that you can activate
00:37:57
that. I didn't see the sign, but I saw
00:37:59
a guy go over there and like start spinning the rope.
00:38:03
And I, you know, again, it's like I've learned my lesson,
00:38:06
right? I have taken the message on
00:38:08
board to follow the rules at exhibitions.
00:38:12
And, and I was kind of looking at him and I was like, is there
00:38:15
a badge there? Is he official?
00:38:18
You know, so I was kind of looking at and he was, he was in
00:38:21
fact official. And then he very kindly.
00:38:24
One of the sculptures be activated because that's one of
00:38:26
the things so regularly people go there people from the Haywood
00:38:30
Gallery obviously and activate the sculpture.
00:38:33
So you very regularly have sound immediately.
00:38:37
Well that's that's that room is full of sound because people I
00:38:40
mean the Haywood gallery is always busy so there's always
00:38:42
people going in and then that rope is activated again.
00:38:46
So quite an eventful start to the exhibition basically.
00:38:52
And then you have two works that are quite interesting which, and
00:38:59
there are kind of works from the beginning, I think 2008 around
00:39:05
that time. So one of them is, and I keep
00:39:10
forgetting the name of that work.
00:39:11
So I'm going to see in the catalogue social conditions of
00:39:14
the Sitting Table, which is from 2001, and it's a photographic
00:39:18
piece and with a little text, so quite conceptual.
00:39:22
So really a work from the beginning where she had a more
00:39:27
social and political stance, let's say.
00:39:30
And they're photographs of sitting tables, which is
00:39:35
apparently a South Korean or maybe a whole a Korean
00:39:39
phenomenon of making these makeshift tables that are made
00:39:46
with found materials, I think. And they're supposed to be in
00:39:50
front of shops and they are used for everything, basically.
00:39:55
You can lean onto them. You can put things on them.
00:39:58
And I didn't understand the purpose of those tables.
00:40:01
I just understood that they are a dying tradition.
00:40:05
And she kind of wanted to document it because it's
00:40:11
disappearing and it's a very moving object.
00:40:15
Yeah. And I loved it though.
00:40:16
I mean, I love, I love the whole simple notion of let's just
00:40:20
create this table that people can kind of do what they need to
00:40:24
do. And I mean, going back to where
00:40:26
we opened up with this book I'm reading on social capital and
00:40:31
Robert Putnam's work, it's like, that's how that little things
00:40:36
like that help engineer community that is more
00:40:40
connected. And I I, yeah, I loved those.
00:40:44
Yeah, I love that piece as well because it is also a piece.
00:40:47
And that's why I say that I didn't quite understand the
00:40:50
purpose of it because it's one of those idiosyncrasies, right?
00:40:55
It's one of those those things that probably for Koreans are
00:40:59
like, sure, the sitting table obviously, and for us like, but
00:41:03
what is? But wait, so you put stuff on
00:41:06
it, but then you sit on it. Why is it called sitting table?
00:41:09
Because you don't. You use stables for sitting, you
00:41:12
know? Yeah, exactly.
00:41:14
And it also shows the difference in body behaviour.
00:41:21
And then I did some research and there's something called, it's
00:41:24
not a sitting table, but there's these exterior tables that are
00:41:28
quite wide. And they're used in Korea for
00:41:31
people to lie down in the garden, to sit, to have a
00:41:34
picnic. They're even in gardens, so a
00:41:37
whole different use of tables. And I thought that was so clever
00:41:41
to put that in there because OK, the Jingle Bells, it is a
00:41:47
reference to a sound that is used in rituals in, in the whole
00:41:51
of Asia really, not really only in Korea.
00:41:54
You may see it or not, you know, you may kind of get the the gist
00:41:58
of it, but then you get a very specific reference whereby you
00:42:02
are in touch with a culture that is Uber specific.
00:42:07
Then that's a that's there's, there's a super specificity of
00:42:10
this piece that I really loved. I thought it was so clever.
00:42:13
And then on the side of it, you have a work called Duo, which
00:42:17
means outside. She probably did it when she was
00:42:19
doing her residency in Paris. It's a slide piece.
00:42:22
So it's a slide projector projecting these old drawings
00:42:28
and I noticed that each one of them, each page, so they're kind
00:42:31
of scanned or photographed and each page has has these parts
00:42:39
that are marked or or hidden with a marker, black marker.
00:42:45
And it's all the same kind of colour, a bit yellowish drawings
00:42:50
or prints of these organ, urban organization of space.
00:42:57
So this modernist idea of the city, this utopian idea of what
00:43:02
it is, a city by the seaside, what it is, a leisure space in
00:43:07
the city, what it is high rises. How are they together in the
00:43:11
city? How are they placed along the
00:43:14
streets? How are the streets organized?
00:43:16
It's a very kind of, and I like the yellow part of it.
00:43:20
It it's a bit melancholy. And you see side by side these
00:43:24
two aspects that you're going to traverse the whole show.
00:43:27
Even though she let go of the more social things, she's more
00:43:30
interested in biography, but she lets go of that kind of social,
00:43:36
almost anthropological aspects to the image of the image.
00:43:40
And she goes on to materials. But it's really interesting to
00:43:43
see that she's really looking at the effects that modernism had
00:43:49
on cultures that weren't the breeding grounds of, of those
00:43:54
shapes and those ideals and those utopias.
00:43:58
So that was interesting. And then there's a big
00:44:01
installation of abstracts, drawings made with sanding
00:44:06
paper, these cones that end with kind of these circular shapes
00:44:12
and on tracing paper that she either purchased or she made.
00:44:17
She had, she had, she produced herself, she she designed
00:44:20
herself that have kind of these squares coming out.
00:44:24
So they're no longer really, it's not tracing paper, sorry.
00:44:28
It's millimetric paper. You call it that paper that has
00:44:32
kind of the lines, the grids marks for architecture and
00:44:37
technical drawing. And then you have a photograph
00:44:43
printed in and on the wall that depicts the sort.
00:44:48
It's huge. It's black and white and depicts
00:44:50
a sort of garden exterior. And those kind of very abstract
00:44:56
shapes are on top of it. And so that's the very eventful
00:45:02
entrance of the exhibition. And that so in that first room,
00:45:06
you know, I I talked to the docent that was doing the
00:45:11
twirling. The shaking of the rope.
00:45:12
Yeah, exactly. And then he told me the whole,
00:45:16
the whole folklore story about the kids.
00:45:20
And then and then I was chatting with another another guy who
00:45:25
worked at the gallery and he was telling me about the Van Gogh
00:45:29
exhibition that like. As a National Gallery.
00:45:33
That's it. Yeah.
00:45:34
And, and he was saying how much he loved it and da, da, da.
00:45:37
And. And there was part of me that
00:45:38
was like, he's waxing really lyrical about, you know,
00:45:42
grandmasters, You know, I wonder what he thinks of the show.
00:45:45
And then he started just effusively talking about the
00:45:50
Haggy Yang show and. And he was like, oh, and there
00:45:54
she is. She just walked through.
00:45:56
She just got through the exhibition.
00:45:58
I was like, yeah, Emily, I know, I know.
00:46:02
I was like, wow. So she's here, which I find very
00:46:06
exciting and distracting at the same time, always because it's
00:46:10
like. You're the only person this
00:46:11
shouldn't happen to you because you get distracted by the
00:46:13
presence of the. Artists Totally, totally.
00:46:16
And then I'm like, oh, wow, is that, you know, but she, she
00:46:19
literally just walked like through the, through the floor,
00:46:23
you know, across the floor and then went down to the lower
00:46:26
around floor because, and we'll get to this.
00:46:30
She has a bit of the exhibition that she puts up week by week.
00:46:34
So every Tuesday she'll she goes in and decides how to how to
00:46:40
change the exhibition, which also makes it feel very alive.
00:46:43
Just a note to say that Drip Drop BLOB Dons trustworthy #2028
00:46:49
is the, is the title of these abstract drawings that I'm
00:46:52
trying to describe. Yeah, and they're from two,
00:46:56
2013. And then the picture in the
00:46:59
background is called Poetics of Displacement and it's from 2011.
00:47:05
So there's really, I mean, she really drops a few hints, even
00:47:10
this idea of abstraction. And if you buy the catalogue,
00:47:13
there's one of the very few. Really interesting texts that
00:47:17
I've read, I haven't finished yet about abstraction.
00:47:21
Really interesting. And what it is that an artist
00:47:25
like her is taken from is taking from the history of obstruction
00:47:32
and what that history is besides the European history.
00:47:36
It's really interesting. So, so then you go to the second
00:47:40
level of the exhibition. Then you can kind of see from
00:47:43
that ground level, she again included the staff of the
00:47:52
institution to decide on what colour that whole room would be
00:47:57
painted in. Oh.
00:47:59
Really, I miss. That, yes, it's written, yeah.
00:48:02
There's a little label that says that that colour was chosen by
00:48:07
the team that was working with her.
00:48:09
I love that. And they chose an almost Yves
00:48:13
Klan blue because Yves Klan, the artists invented a blue, I think
00:48:19
even patented it, patented it. Not sure about what I'm saying,
00:48:26
but I mean, it's his blue. So it's known as the Yves Klan
00:48:29
blue. And that blue is very close to
00:48:32
it. So he produced many paintings in
00:48:35
that blue and sculptures, objects, etcetera.
00:48:40
Eve clan. I mean, so that's the and it's
00:48:45
the Eve clan blue is radiating, it radiates.
00:48:48
It's a very, it's a very peculiar colour because it's
00:48:52
very dense. And at the same time it has a
00:48:55
fourth, a form of it. It has some light at the same
00:48:58
time it's deep and light. So it's a very strong room with
00:49:03
these incredible sculptures and these lines stenciled on the
00:49:10
ground. So there's this whole activity,
00:49:14
this whole movement on the ground that are seemingly, I
00:49:19
presume, notations for the movement of the sculptures
00:49:23
because all the sculptures move. And then there's another work on
00:49:28
the wall that is text like pages of books onto these rather
00:49:37
unremarkable circles or shapes. They're not quite circular, but
00:49:43
they become circular because you can activate them or you can
00:49:46
make them rotate really quickly until they be, they form a
00:49:50
perfect circle. And the pages, the, the book
00:49:54
pages are about activists, writers, creative people who are
00:50:01
politically active. So there's a reference to
00:50:05
Ghassan kind of kind of funny, I think a Palestinian writer and
00:50:11
activist. There's references to many, you
00:50:15
know, to, to, to very different people from all over the world.
00:50:19
And I kind of sensed it might have been a reference to her mom
00:50:24
as well. I mean, she always has this idea
00:50:26
and she talks about it in an interview that for her, it was
00:50:31
kind of a territory where she couldn't go because her family
00:50:35
were political, they were activists, and she's an artist.
00:50:38
So how do you articulate the spaces of action?
00:50:45
That room feels alive. You are there in the midst of
00:50:53
all of it. I mean, you cannot help but be a
00:50:55
part of what is happening in that room because of because
00:51:01
you're. Yeah, you're literally in the
00:51:03
middle of it. So all of these sculptures or
00:51:06
what? There's one hanging from the
00:51:07
ceiling that has the Venetian blinds, but the rest of them are
00:51:12
all on caster wheels, so you can see that they move and they look
00:51:17
like friendly objects. They look like structure as you
00:51:20
might want to jump into SO. Oh, they're stacked corners,
00:51:25
ventilating orange and Blue Square, which is really
00:51:28
beautiful. So this is the first time we
00:51:30
encounter works made with Venetian blinds.
00:51:32
So Venetian blinds really are a staple of her creation.
00:51:38
She really uses them repeatedly. Yeah, so there's that one.
00:51:43
There's reflected red, blue Cubist dancing mask, which is
00:51:47
supposed to hide your whole body and to kind of have these shapes
00:51:53
a little bit like an African mask because modernism was so
00:51:57
inspired by African masks and you're supposed to make it swirl
00:52:02
and hide behind it, but it's like this deep blue.
00:52:06
Then there's these red, it looks like the game Tangram.
00:52:10
I don't know if I think we're the only family who has that
00:52:13
game. It's like these geometric pieces
00:52:17
and you have a card with a shape and you have to recreate the
00:52:19
shape with like a triangle, a square, you know, these
00:52:23
different pieces. And it's sometimes quite kind of
00:52:26
hard. You can spend like 35 minutes on
00:52:27
it. And it made me think of that.
00:52:29
Then they can become shapes like almost anthropomorphic or boats
00:52:34
or objects or animals. It's it's quite Asian actually.
00:52:39
I think it's probably an Asian game.
00:52:40
And this piece kind of made me think of that.
00:52:44
There's the rounding intermediates.
00:52:46
So some of them are part of the group of works that she calls
00:52:51
the intermediates, right? Yeah.
00:52:55
So do you want to explain what those are?
00:52:56
They're very colorful, they're very tactile.
00:52:59
They have kind of knobs and sort of ribbons coming out of them.
00:53:04
And when I was there, there was almost a a pair of women that
00:53:08
were getting very close to touching them because you almost
00:53:12
can't help yourself. And the dolphin was over very
00:53:15
quickly to say, no, I'm sorry, you can't, you can't touch
00:53:18
these. You know, they, they do have
00:53:21
the, the, the gallery staff come and, and operate them and kind
00:53:27
of, you know, move them around from time to time.
00:53:29
That didn't happen while I was there, but the, the experience
00:53:33
of being in the middle of that because there's the objects that
00:53:37
move. There are these friendly aliens.
00:53:40
There's this African, you know, kind of mask ish sculpture you
00:53:46
you talked about, and then there's the ones that you could
00:53:49
get in like with the Venetian blinds.
00:53:51
And then there's another big structure with the Jingle Bells
00:53:55
and the Venetian blinds that that someone actually does get
00:53:58
in the middle of to operate. And it felt like that feeling of
00:54:02
being in a kid, being a kid and getting a big box and playing
00:54:07
house, you know, like, yes, it's really small, but I want to be
00:54:10
in there and feel what it feels like to be in there.
00:54:14
And things will change. I will feel differently in that
00:54:17
space. And that's what it felt like
00:54:21
looking at those, but then being in the center of it because the,
00:54:26
the, the, the other thing that these sculptures do is play with
00:54:31
light and there's light, you know, around and the, the
00:54:35
shadows that they cast are remarkable.
00:54:39
And they're casting those shadows on a floor that have
00:54:43
these sketches that you described on them.
00:54:46
So it is just a swirling, a, a, a feeling of being in, in
00:54:52
something that is alive because they can all move.
00:54:54
And, you know, they can all move.
00:54:56
And in the back of your mind, you're kind of half waiting for
00:54:59
them to do so and half waiting for your own hands to just match
00:55:04
them. I could empathize with those two
00:55:07
ladies so much. So these intermediates are parts
00:55:13
of and that's why it's very hard to describe them because they
00:55:18
are parts of a project. So from the moment where in 2015
00:55:22
she went to Seoul and she had that big exhibition at the Liam
00:55:26
Museum, she started working with basket weaving with lots of
00:55:33
traditional crafts that are not. So the, the, the status of those
00:55:39
crafts is not the same as in Europe or let's say in the
00:55:42
Occidental world, or at least in the system of the arts in Europe
00:55:48
and America and, you know, and the other countries touched by
00:55:53
our notion here of the arts and the arts hierarchies.
00:55:58
So for us, crafts, unfortunately always comes kind of at the
00:56:01
bottom. The kind of lesser art in Korea,
00:56:04
not so much. So it's complex.
00:56:07
There's a big Museum of crafts there's it's taken seriously,
00:56:12
it's collected, it's revered so much so that when she tried to
00:56:18
learn, no one wanted to teach her, like they didn't understand
00:56:22
what she was doing. And she finally found a kind
00:56:25
hearted, open minded person who taught her and who was willing
00:56:30
to help her and so started this project.
00:56:33
And it's hard to describe because it's kind of like
00:56:36
baskets gone gone crazy. Like suddenly rather than have
00:56:39
being open and carrying stuff, they kind of close up.
00:56:43
Then they have these beautiful degrade colors, Blues and
00:56:47
yellows, oranges and Reds. Then there's stuff coming off of
00:56:50
them. And then suddenly they look like
00:56:52
sea animals, sea creatures. There's another creature that
00:56:56
makes me think a bit of a pinata with these cones coming off of
00:57:03
it and these really beautiful colors that just really work
00:57:09
well together somehow. You know, it's kind of lime
00:57:12
green and red and this kind of mid intensity blue and it's
00:57:21
complex and then they have handles and that's really
00:57:24
interesting because there's this haptic quality to the work.
00:57:27
And it's true that I maybe am way too well behaved or perhaps
00:57:32
traumatized by being pranked by a security guard as I entered.
00:57:36
And for me was out of the question, like I was not
00:57:39
touching anything else in this exhibition.
00:57:42
And and I was not lucky. Like no one activated anything
00:57:46
while while I was there. And I was really taken by the
00:57:50
whole room. And there's another piece that
00:57:52
is kind of homage to solar width.
00:57:54
I don't think we have time to talk about her love for solar
00:57:56
width. Just to say that the notion of
00:58:00
leap, so leap year is a leap year, obviously a gap year or
00:58:04
whatever, but the notion of leap for solely wit is applied in
00:58:10
terms of being in a sort of technical form of existence or
00:58:16
action. And then leaping to an the same
00:58:19
thing can leap into a conceptual existence, for example.
00:58:22
So there's a sort of a leap and he says that artists are
00:58:25
mysticists rather than rationalists.
00:58:27
You know, they can leap to conclusions that, you know,
00:58:30
reason cannot support. So for her, the idea of leap is
00:58:34
really important and she loves solar.
00:58:36
There's lots of or she emulates him some somehow titles are
00:58:41
great. I think that the thing with her
00:58:43
that I so admire is that everything is so carefully
00:58:48
thought through, but with lots but with a poetic kind of
00:58:52
simplicity. She has another exhibition.
00:58:56
She had a big retrospective exhibition at the Lutwig Museum
00:58:59
in 2018 that was called ETA 1998, 2018, which is just, yeah,
00:59:07
estimated time of arrival, 1998, and which probably was the
00:59:13
survey, you know, between those years of production.
00:59:17
Yeah. So she has this kind of notion
00:59:20
of time and space as a sort of a movement between forms of
00:59:25
consciousness almost. It's so interesting.
00:59:28
I think that's so right. I think you've really hit the
00:59:30
nail on the head because I, I, while I was going through the
00:59:34
exhibition, I kept feeling this notion or hearing this, this
00:59:38
phrase of this feels like fully formed ideas, you know, that.
00:59:43
And I couldn't, I couldn't really pinpoint what I even
00:59:46
meant by that. But I think what you're saying
00:59:49
is just that she, you know, there's some things that are
00:59:51
simple, like, I mean, even the Venetian blinds are, they're
00:59:54
kind of simple in their own way. I mean, they're a simple
00:59:57
structure in and of themselves. But I I you get the sense like
01:00:02
there can be simplicity that is a lightweight.
01:00:06
And simplicity that is, not, that is.
01:00:09
That has a. Lot of gravity to it.
01:00:12
And she is that ladder and it's I, I love that it's almost
01:00:17
ineffable kind of to to really pinpoint what that, you know,
01:00:22
it's a it's a distinction with a huge difference, you know, and
01:00:26
yeah, she's great. I mean, I loved just going back
01:00:30
to the, the kind of basket weaving animals that was the
01:00:35
they're not animals necessarily. I mean, they were kind of
01:00:38
inspired by Japanese and Korean like those giant puppets that
01:00:46
they have in parades that take many people to perform with that
01:00:52
are phenomenal to watch. So they're kind of, they're sort
01:00:55
of smaller versions of those somehow.
01:00:58
And that was the only place I, I, I felt like they were all
01:01:01
kind of cramped in the corner. I was like, I want them to be.
01:01:05
I wanted a big space. But so you go up the stairs and
01:01:09
as you go up, you enter a room that has a lot of the works with
01:01:15
Venetian blinds. There's separations made by
01:01:18
Venetian blinds, which is kind of the most chaotic room, let's
01:01:23
say, where she tried to cramp a lot of stuff in there.
01:01:26
There's a big piece called, I think, Reuben Noir.
01:01:31
It's a street where Marguerite Giras lived in Paris, but she
01:01:35
doesn't state. I mean, there's lots of texts
01:01:37
explaining lots of stuff in the exhibition.
01:01:40
So you get a lot of information from the texts.
01:01:44
And so apparently that piece is based on every appliance she had
01:01:48
at home at the time, and it's the exact size of Margaret
01:01:53
Jehas's apartment or one of the rooms.
01:01:58
So there's a sort of superimposition between two
01:02:00
lives. And across the exhibition, there
01:02:03
are these references of people that she kind of merges with in
01:02:10
some way. So there's her mum, there's
01:02:13
those political activists that are mentioned downstairs.
01:02:17
There's Marguerite Juras, who obviously, and this is this is
01:02:21
the apartment where where she lived while from memory, she was
01:02:25
waiting for her husband to come back from the wall.
01:02:29
And he comes back emaciated like to a point where he looked like
01:02:34
he was dead to her. It was a kind of a there's a
01:02:38
book called, I think it's Levy material in Material Life where
01:02:41
she talks about this. And so there's so it's that
01:02:45
period, like very strange period, which is akin to her own
01:02:50
life where she just South Korea just came out of a dictatorship.
01:02:55
Her father went through what he went through.
01:02:57
And then she kind of emerges in a freer life, a freer context.
01:03:02
And then there's a piece that I loved the most, one of them,
01:03:08
which is disappointing because her work is amazing, her work
01:03:12
with materials is incredible. But that just broke me.
01:03:16
The texts on the wall. So there's 12 printed a A4 pages
01:03:21
on the wall basically, which are a correspondence between her
01:03:24
mother and herself. Oh yeah.
01:03:26
Yeah, or where the two of them decided to talk about her mom's
01:03:31
arrival in Germany. And so the two of them have are
01:03:35
talking about the same period of time and how they experienced
01:03:39
each other's presence, how the mom experienced Germany and how,
01:03:44
hey, Wei Young experienced her arrival, the arrival of her mom
01:03:49
in Germany, her idea of what who her mom was and who she really
01:03:54
was there. And it's, I found the story
01:04:01
absolutely heartbreaking in its banality and it's and it's.
01:04:08
Was there like the flooding? Wasn't there the flooding of the
01:04:11
bathroom? So the mum at some point finds
01:04:13
herself taking a bath because that's the thing that connects
01:04:17
her to Korea, because in Korea you wash yourself thoroughly.
01:04:22
And baths are important. They clean your soul.
01:04:25
They have a significance, They're spiritual.
01:04:28
And so she goes and draws a bath.
01:04:31
And then when she wants to drain the water away, she goes into a
01:04:35
panic because there's no, there's no drain.
01:04:41
And so she calls Hague Young and says what is happening?
01:04:48
Your, your, your apartment is faulty.
01:04:51
There's no drain. Where is the drain?
01:04:52
Where is the drain? She gets really panicky and only
01:04:56
to realise later when her daughter tells her that in
01:04:59
Germany people don't bathe like that.
01:05:01
That's not how it works. You go into the bathtub and you
01:05:04
don't just put water all over the bathroom like in Korea.
01:05:09
And again, it's like that piece with the sitting tables, such a
01:05:13
small she doesn't need to say a lot.
01:05:17
You don't need her biography. You don't need her to tell you
01:05:20
500 anecdotes of the differences between cultures because this is
01:05:24
far more deep than that. This is when you realize in
01:05:28
another language that there's a word for something that doesn't
01:05:32
exist in some other language that you speak.
01:05:34
And you think, what a moment of solitude.
01:05:38
There's also this cultural solitude that you can be in and
01:05:43
this emancipation through things that are so familiar to you that
01:05:48
suddenly is not possible even if you were to do them.
01:05:52
There's something that's not magical anymore.
01:05:54
There's something. So there's a lot to say about
01:05:56
these this piece, and it's against these very cold objects.
01:06:02
So one thing to say about, hey, we're young that I kind of
01:06:06
struggle with a little bit is that the objects are perfect.
01:06:09
Yeah. They're just, you know, the
01:06:11
appliances with the Venetian blinds with everything's so
01:06:15
clean, everything's so perfect. Everything's measured to the
01:06:18
millimeter, everything's produced.
01:06:21
And the light comes. And then and suddenly you're
01:06:23
looking at the box that's covered with the beneath that
01:06:26
has a sort of Venetian blinds hiding what's inside.
01:06:28
And there's the sunset tea light that emanates through it and
01:06:31
that you know, and everything's just so beautiful and just so
01:06:37
elegantly done. And then you realize where that
01:06:42
comes from. And there's this kind of, there
01:06:45
was a sort of a moment there in that room when I was thinking,
01:06:49
this makes me think of the odds where we weren't.
01:06:52
This kind of effervescence of working with standardized and
01:06:56
mass produced materials and having international careers and
01:07:00
exhibiting from country to country guilt free, anything was
01:07:04
possible. This was before obviously 2008
01:07:10
and there's this thing at end of the 90s and there's this thing
01:07:13
sometimes in her work that takes me back to that time because the
01:07:17
use of mass product, mass produced materials inevitably
01:07:24
will tell me that it will bring me to that idea of these
01:07:28
Venetian blinds are all over the world.
01:07:30
And that's her point as well. You can find them in Brazil, you
01:07:34
can find them in Yucatan, you can find them in Porto, you can
01:07:38
find them everywhere. But there's also the fact that
01:07:42
they're the materials that you're making the work with, and
01:07:45
then suddenly the work becomes desensitized because it is using
01:07:50
those materials and it's saying that thing.
01:07:54
But I think she's talking about culture and I'm thinking of
01:07:57
production, but I can't really separate the two, if that makes
01:08:01
sense. So there's a part of me and her
01:08:03
work that kind of goes back to that time.
01:08:06
And there's a quote of her where there's a in an interview in the
01:08:12
catalogue where she's talking about the way she works.
01:08:17
It kind of struck me, and I'm going to read it to you.
01:08:20
So she says, I have been working at Stardust Shula, my alma
01:08:24
mater, since 2017. And these days my schedule is
01:08:28
predetermined by my teaching job and the academic calendar during
01:08:34
the So you think, oh, she's doesn't have a lot of time to
01:08:37
work. And then she says, during the
01:08:39
semester, I stay in Berlin and travel in Europe and North
01:08:42
America. So already like, oh, leap
01:08:46
Europe, North America. And during the school break, I
01:08:50
do my work in and out of Seoul. OK, Well, she's, you know that
01:08:55
the dimension of her life is huge.
01:08:59
I'm trying to spend more time in Asia.
01:09:01
Last December, for example, I was in Bangkok in Chiang Rai,
01:09:05
Thailand for three weeks. I spent a couple of days in
01:09:08
Manila in March 2024 and I wish to go back to the Philippines
01:09:12
soon on a long desired field trip to trace and explore
01:09:17
pabolat, the tradition of paper cutting in a Filipino context.
01:09:21
Pabolat has a very vague origin. It may have been derived from
01:09:25
Chinese paper cutting brought by Chinese merchants, or could have
01:09:30
could also have been an offshoot of the Mexican technique of
01:09:33
papel picado in this paragraph. Since 2017, we've been all over
01:09:40
the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:09:43
And to me, and it's also, I have a question and unfortunately,
01:09:47
you're not Asian, you can't tell me.
01:09:48
But for me, it's really weird because I keep thinking about if
01:09:53
I'm Portuguese. There's a lot of, you know, arts
01:09:55
and crafts in Portugal. What would it mean if an artist
01:10:00
went back to basket weavers and what and started kind of using
01:10:04
those techniques to make big objects?
01:10:07
And we have an artist who does that Joanna Bash con selves.
01:10:10
And then there's another installation that is about the
01:10:14
first work she did in Korea, which was to go back to her
01:10:19
grandparents home. That was derelict, basically in
01:10:25
shambles and do an art installation there.
01:10:29
And that is absolutely incredible.
01:10:32
So she has those two aspects of the migrant who is in the Super
01:10:38
modern in Germany, in Germany is not what it was, but in Germany,
01:10:42
so a highly historically industrialized country.
01:10:48
And at the same time, she has that thing of I'm going to go
01:10:51
back to that home. I'm going to work with origami
01:10:56
work. I mean, origami might not be the
01:10:57
correct word. I don't know if it's translates
01:11:00
to Korea. I'm going to work with lamps,
01:11:03
lights, little objects and the installations.
01:11:07
It's called Saigon 30. I think it's it was an
01:11:10
exhibition and she and she kept the notes that people left about
01:11:15
the exhibition that were super moving and they're projected
01:11:18
onto a Venetian blind. And that's where it shifted for
01:11:22
me. And I thought, OK, OK, there
01:11:24
really is something where she's incredibly honest.
01:11:28
You know, what I'm hearing you say is that she's kept the
01:11:31
threads. You know, she hasn't moved
01:11:34
around and dropped the threads necessarily of, you know, art
01:11:39
that influenced her as a child or things than experiences she
01:11:43
had when she was younger. It's like it's all built in
01:11:48
rather than, oh, I'm moving here, so I'm dropping this.
01:11:52
It's like, I mean, you know, I guess actually like her big
01:11:57
piece of, you know, unpacking all of her, the storage piece.
01:12:01
The storage piece. Yeah, exactly.
01:12:03
She takes it with her like she's not, she's she's she's building
01:12:07
onto and folding into rather than, you know, just sort of
01:12:11
dropping and being like, OK, now I'm going to go for this very
01:12:14
clean, you know, mass produced aesthetic.
01:12:18
It's it's that it all is coming from that place.
01:12:22
And yeah, maybe that's where the weight is, you know, is that you
01:12:25
can feel that in. It was just reading this article
01:12:29
in The Atlantic by Annie Lowry about like, basically it was
01:12:33
like women put down the vacuums. It was like a, it was a, it was
01:12:37
a thing about domestic labour and there was a bit.
01:12:42
Eternal question. The forever right and it's like
01:12:46
there's married women do more domestic labour than single
01:12:51
women, but married men do not do more domestic labour than single
01:12:56
men. Like, you know, shock.
01:12:58
Yeah, exactly. And, and her, I mean, her, her
01:13:03
kind of point of it was, you know, just just put down the
01:13:06
like, let's not, let's stop killing ourselves for feeling
01:13:10
like we need to rise to a standard of very tidy homes and
01:13:13
therefore performing our gender in that way.
01:13:16
That's a little off course, but the but I liked that that Hagi
01:13:22
Yang was using those very familiar, unimportant domestic
01:13:28
objects. I mean, who's who is looking
01:13:31
after the blinds, you know, I mean, I have taken a wet rag in
01:13:35
my spring cleaning and wiped each and every blind of the
01:13:40
thick dust that manages to get caked on there.
01:13:44
And, you know, so, so I feel like my connection to those
01:13:50
domestic objects are so deep, I can't even I did, you know, you
01:13:58
don't even realize it right until you see them reflected in
01:14:02
the way that she has presented them.
01:14:05
And it's like, wow, there is like, these are the things of
01:14:08
our lives. These are the things that are in
01:14:10
our homes and you know, what we're interacting with every
01:14:14
day. And it would be very, very easy
01:14:16
to say, you know, that that's just very low, you know, and
01:14:20
she's not trying to be as clever about them.
01:14:24
No. She's not trying.
01:14:26
To be What do you mean by that? I know what I think, but what do
01:14:30
you mean? Well, I can you say that?
01:14:33
I mean, like Mike Kelly, for example, is very clever.
01:14:37
He is being in your face with it.
01:14:39
And I'm saying something with this, and this is the thing, and
01:14:42
I'm going to shock you a little bit with what I'm saying.
01:14:44
Or just, you know, kind of give you a barrage of senses with,
01:14:51
you know, this thing, this twirling curtain, you know, or
01:14:54
whatever it is. And she's not, she's, she's
01:14:57
saying this is a, you know, this is a thing that we can make a
01:15:02
construction from that will be a beautiful object in and of
01:15:06
itself, you know, without any kind of tongue in cheek.
01:15:09
Gotcha. I mean those Venetian blinds
01:15:13
again with the light and the shadows on the on the ground and
01:15:18
the the way that they hold. The image in the middle of the
01:15:23
room and create spaces and our screens that films are projected
01:15:28
onto. And there's this kind of idea of
01:15:33
the ritualization of the everyday life is the deep
01:15:39
feeling that the meaning is there as soon as you displace
01:15:46
it. It's kind of sad.
01:15:47
It's a bit melancholy. Thinking of those Venetian blind
01:15:51
structures, it's like they're very rigid in a way.
01:15:56
They're, they're strong, you know, they're, they're cubes
01:16:00
stacked on cubes stacked on cubes often.
01:16:05
And that's a very strong looking structure.
01:16:08
But then the blinds themselves have that delicacy of letting
01:16:12
through the light. And there's something wonderful
01:16:15
about the intersection of and the play of that that I think
01:16:19
makes them just such a pleasure to be in the presence of, you
01:16:24
know, that that that it's so much is true about this thing.
01:16:28
And you know, it's, it's very simply demonstrating that.
01:16:34
So, yeah. And it and it, it kind of
01:16:37
relates to the mesmerizing mesh pieces.
01:16:41
Yeah, so. She want to talk about those
01:16:44
That's that's the her most recent work basically.
01:16:48
She did. She did them mostly during COVID
01:16:52
and they're pieces on a wall and they are.
01:16:57
When I first looked at them, my first thought was like, oh,
01:16:59
tissue paper. It looks like tissue paper
01:17:02
because it's very colorful, very delicate paper that she's cut
01:17:06
into colleges to look like. They're like different spirits I
01:17:11
guess. Well, there's different, there's
01:17:13
different groups of them. So some of them are like these
01:17:16
patterns, these shapes, they're more abstract and there's some
01:17:21
that are more figural. Let's say that they have these
01:17:23
more kind of almost totemic like creatures.
01:17:28
Some of them are almost like animals.
01:17:32
Some of them start looking like something and then destructure
01:17:35
or, or, or a just structure at some point.
01:17:38
And they look like those drawings that you make when
01:17:41
you're a kid, when you you fold paper and you cut with scissors
01:17:45
and then you open them. So this was a rabbit hole I went
01:17:50
down. Hanji.
01:17:51
It's called Hanji paper. OK, tell me.
01:17:55
So, you know, if we're going back to the delicate but strong
01:17:59
theme, this is absolutely it. So it's made from Mulberry bark
01:18:05
because, yeah, when I first saw it, I was like, oh, it's, this
01:18:07
is the kind of childlike, it looks like tissue paper.
01:18:09
It has that kind of color quality, etcetera.
01:18:12
And then when I was online and she was talking about this Hanji
01:18:17
paper, that sort of traditional Korean Japanese paper, it's made
01:18:21
from the bulk of Mulberry trees. The, the bark is mixed with kind
01:18:27
of the slime of other roots. So like it's, it's, you know,
01:18:33
put in sort of a VAT and then it's, you know, put together
01:18:37
with the slime so that it has something that congeals it a bit
01:18:40
like putting an egg in, you know, something that you're
01:18:43
baking. And then, you know, it has to be
01:18:46
made by hand. And it's a, it's a really
01:18:50
artistic process in and of itself to make this paper, but
01:18:55
it can last for 1000 years. The works themselves are really
01:19:01
arresting. I mean, they are just, they
01:19:04
really grab your attention and they have a lot of presence,
01:19:08
whatever the form is. I mean, those sort of Titanic
01:19:11
figures you were talking about, I would say in particular, but
01:19:16
and it also made me think just, you know, someone who she was in
01:19:19
Korea during COVID. She was stuck there, yeah.
01:19:23
Yeah, yeah. And I just love the fact that
01:19:27
she was like, what do I have to hand?
01:19:30
What is near me and what, you know, what, what, what what can
01:19:34
I make that's brilliant out of this?
01:19:36
That it, it just, I loved the notion of her kind of being
01:19:40
trapped wherever she was, as we all were, and just sitting there
01:19:45
and figuring out how to produce these incredible works.
01:19:50
Yeah, I just love that. I I read a little bit of the
01:19:54
parts of the catalogue that talks about them.
01:19:56
So she was looking into shamanism.
01:19:59
And so these papers are used in shamanistic rituals.
01:20:02
Another thing that I thought particularly when I read that
01:20:06
this had to do so, I was arrested by the beauty of it and
01:20:11
I was kind of. Stuck there looking at them.
01:20:14
And then when I read the text that had to do with shamanistic
01:20:17
practices, again, I go back to that thing, which is a question
01:20:21
in the out world, which is that when you're not a shaman
01:20:24
yourself, when you go and take someone else's beliefs through
01:20:30
their techniques or take the techniques outside of the
01:20:33
beliefs and outside of the rituals and the practices and
01:20:36
the system that they're within. I, I think there's a lot of
01:20:41
questions in there. There's a lot of things that you
01:20:44
can ask yourself, What does that mean?
01:20:46
Is, is it a bit soulless, you know, to, to come and grab these
01:20:51
things and to then produce these perfect pieces.
01:20:57
And then she explains that in order to better convey this
01:21:02
context, she enshrined them. So there's around the drawings,
01:21:07
there's this frame that replicates religious or
01:21:13
spiritual architectures, temples as frames.
01:21:21
Then I was reading further and apparently so we were saying
01:21:25
that the arts and crafts are respected in Korea, but there's
01:21:29
again, no one escapes globalism, I guess.
01:21:32
So in Korea, there's this phenomenon of even the curator
01:21:40
of shamanism in the Arts and Crafts Museum or in maybe
01:21:45
another museum, I, I may remember incorrectly, is being a
01:21:49
bit discriminated. So shamanism is really being
01:21:53
discarded in society. It was considered backwards.
01:21:56
So if you stay there, you think, OK, so this is a global
01:22:00
phenomenon and all these traditions that existed up until
01:22:05
now are dying. But actually, if you read
01:22:08
further in the to the catalogue is amazing, I have to say.
01:22:10
It's so nice, easy to read, good texts.
01:22:15
And so apparently during Confucius time, shamanism was
01:22:20
also not well considered and even dangerous to practice.
01:22:25
So shamanism has always had this status of this difficult status
01:22:32
within Korean society. It complexifies this question
01:22:36
that I was asking, which is this?
01:22:39
OK, Well, I'm skirting around the the term of appropriation.
01:22:42
Like, are you appropriating something?
01:22:45
And what does that mean? You're an immigrant, you go back
01:22:48
to your country and you appropriate these techniques
01:22:51
that you haven't even experienced.
01:22:53
You know, it's the same with when I see perfect sculptures
01:22:57
with basket weaving techniques, There's always this moment where
01:23:00
I think, oh, not the question of appropriation.
01:23:03
That's not really the thing, but it's that thing of is art
01:23:06
capable of bringing the energy, the beauty, and something from
01:23:13
these beliefs and from these practices and from these social
01:23:17
structures into society, into culture by doing this?
01:23:24
Or is this the symptom of a dying culture and a way perhaps
01:23:31
to take it somewhere else or to pay homage to it and even to
01:23:35
mourn it? You know, because her creatures
01:23:38
are like celebratory creatures. I like parade creatures for
01:23:41
sure. I.
01:23:42
Mean, yeah, yeah. So I mean, is it, is it a case
01:23:46
of she should leave this work to people who feel it?
01:23:52
Oh no, I would not ever say or prescribe anything to anyone.
01:23:56
I think if there's a compulsion to make, there's a question to
01:23:59
be asked. I think it's a valid question.
01:24:03
I don't have the answers for it. And I loved the exhibition.
01:24:06
I really, really loved the exhibition.
01:24:10
I and I think good art asks these questions and we ourselves
01:24:16
do things, consume things, produce things that may be
01:24:22
symptoms of problematic situations of gentrification.
01:24:29
You know, I don't like these tours in Paris.
01:24:31
They're uncomfortable. I prefer Starbucks, much more
01:24:34
comfortable. I never go there because I have,
01:24:37
I have principles. But if you give me a good pub or
01:24:40
a good cafe, let's say with the goods couches, I don't like the
01:24:45
Bistro. I would love the Bistro to
01:24:46
disappear. I don't like it, you know, but
01:24:48
it's a tradition, right? So.
01:24:50
Sure, sure. This is a very, very silly
01:24:54
example, but you know what I mean.
01:24:56
I'm not prescribing anything. I'm asking questions because I
01:24:59
think these works make you think of these things.
01:25:02
And then and in the text and in her interviews, you can see that
01:25:05
she's thinking about these things.
01:25:07
She's thinking like any migrant would.
01:25:09
I think migration enhances those experiences of loss and of
01:25:14
transmission and of political programs that cancel out a lot
01:25:23
of ways of existing. I mean, the Portuguese
01:25:26
dictatorship ended or all our dialects, there's only one
01:25:29
surviving dialect in the Portuguese metropolitan area.
01:25:34
You know, that's my question. That's.
01:25:35
A good question, yeah. I mean, and kind of like how,
01:25:39
how essential is the death, like death, death of a dialect or
01:25:42
death of a, you know, a culture or death of a thing is a, is a
01:25:47
natural state of affairs as well, I guess.
01:25:51
So it's like, but how much and under what conditions?
01:25:56
Yeah, exactly. Yes, yeah, that's it.
01:25:59
Under what conditions? If it's dying a natural death
01:26:04
like Latin did, sure. You know, it's a, it's, it's a
01:26:10
very specific and I think her pointing out to shamanism is
01:26:14
connected with abstraction, with her immense knowledge of
01:26:18
contemporary arts. And how I think we mentioned
01:26:22
this, or I mentioned this somewhere in another episode,
01:26:25
we're looking at the history of modernism as very, very
01:26:28
patriarchal and even imperialistic because Picasso
01:26:32
was inspired by African mosques, you know, and kind of invented
01:26:37
Cubism. Do you know what I mean?
01:26:38
So there's this thing of of really being very careful now
01:26:42
with maybe deeper connections to images.
01:26:48
Contemporary art is not an Asian notion.
01:26:51
It's an important notion. So she is working in something
01:26:57
that was a colonization, you know, of the Asian or, or let's
01:27:03
say of Korea, but also the Asian continent and culture.
01:27:07
There was no contemporary art. You know, there's, there's, it's
01:27:11
a practice that is imported. And in the beginning, she, you
01:27:14
know, in the museums in Korea, you mostly had European or
01:27:18
American exhibitions. You didn't have Korean artists
01:27:21
showing. And she was one of the first
01:27:23
artists to show in the Leo Museum.
01:27:25
And she's also talking to professionals and to the museum.
01:27:29
You know, what does it mean to have an exhibition that is
01:27:32
ongoing that you have to activate and that you have to
01:27:36
reinstall, which is storage piece?
01:27:38
Yeah, it's hard to describe without describing the room that
01:27:42
it's in. So in there's sort of three
01:27:45
interconnecting rooms and all of the, the, the walls between them
01:27:50
are sort of normal from the ceiling until about, you know,
01:27:56
3/4 of the way down. And then they are, you can,
01:28:00
they're like, you can see the frame of the wall and then there
01:28:03
are like sandbags underneath the wall in the frame.
01:28:09
So it's kind of like this unfinishedness, I guess.
01:28:14
And you know this, you know that you kind of it's almost like
01:28:18
these these bags are the kind of bags of sand or something that
01:28:22
you might throw on the side of a river that's, you know, that's
01:28:27
overflowing. But they're so it's in it's in
01:28:32
quite an unique space in and of itself.
01:28:36
And then storage piece is this huge pallet filled with packaged
01:28:43
up pieces of her art and there's a rope around it.
01:28:48
And when I was there, which was great too, they were putting up
01:28:52
new works of art on the wall. So they had just as I walked
01:28:56
into the room, they were. I definitely need to visit
01:28:59
exhibitions with you, Emily. I love nothing was activated.
01:29:03
Nothing was, you know, displaced.
01:29:07
The artist wasn't there. Wasn't there, she sort of
01:29:10
consults with the museum staff about which ones to put up and
01:29:14
how to hang them and stuff like that.
01:29:15
So I, I assume that's what she was in the, in the gallery for.
01:29:20
It's kind of a very artfully packed palette, wouldn't you
01:29:25
say? I mean, it's sort of abnormally
01:29:28
high in a way, and it just shows you everything that she has had
01:29:33
to bring around with her as an artist who's been creating art
01:29:39
for 25 years. It really is quite something to
01:29:44
bring such perfect objects, like I was saying, like these
01:29:48
absolutely immaculately produced pieces of art.
01:29:52
And then to have that rubbish that, you know, I don't know, I,
01:29:57
I'm with you. I, it wasn't amazing.
01:29:59
I really want to come go back. And by the way, Emily, I want to
01:30:03
understand what I did. Did I touch the wrong sculpture?
01:30:08
Yes, you did, yes. And on that note, it's around.
01:30:13
He was. He was talking about the bell
01:30:16
curtain. He's.
01:30:18
Sorry how you're young. Absolutely done.
01:30:21
You know what can? You do.
01:30:22
Well, this is great. I mean, I have to say I knew
01:30:25
nothing about Hagu Yang before this exhibition, which not that
01:30:29
uncommon for me, but. Oh, I didn't know much, to be
01:30:32
very honest with you. Yeah, the guy at the gallery
01:30:35
that I was talking to was saying how, you know, she just isn't
01:30:39
that well known in the UK, you know, obviously much more so in
01:30:45
Berlin. But but yeah, what a treat.
01:30:48
What an absolute treat for the senses.
01:30:51
I mean, it felt like, it felt like, like her storage piece,
01:30:56
she was just reaching back in her cultural history and her own
01:31:00
memory and her own ideas and just just unfolding them and
01:31:05
presenting them in a way that one could relate to.
01:31:08
I mean, which I think is such a difficult thing to do, you know.
01:31:11
I mean, I felt, I felt like I could understand something about
01:31:16
what her experience was, this migrant experience and, you
01:31:22
know, relate that to my own, which is, you know, which is the
01:31:27
thing. But yeah, so it was brilliant.
01:31:29
So thank you. It was lovely chatting with you
01:31:30
about it. This was delightful.
01:31:32
And don't forget visit exhibitions because we visit
01:31:37
them so that you have to take care all.
01:31:41
Right. Brilliant.
01:31:42
Thanks everyone. Thanks, Rana.
01:31:43
Take care. Bye bye.