Haegue Yang "lands" in Milan with the exhibition Tightrope walking and its wordless shadow. It is the first solo show organized by the Korean artist Haegue Yang in Italy, promoted by the Furla Foundation and the Milan Triennale, and curated by Bruna Roccasalva. The exhibition will be held right at the Milan Triennale from 7 September to 4 November 2018 and showcases the vast range of expressive means that distinguish Yang's practice: from collage to video, from performative sculptures to large installations. The extreme variety of references and visions produced, which pass from social investigation to history, from personal experience to collective memory, generates images and imaginative paths of great evocative power in which objects, people and places are inextricably interconnected.
TightropesWalking and Its Wordless Shadow, explains the press release with which the Milanese exhibition was presented, "is divided into three environments which through the combination of iconic works and new ambitious productions - which represent crucial nodes in the artist's production from 2000 to today - restores the recurring elements in the Haegue Yang's work: interest in abstraction and geometry; movement and performativity; the relationship between 'folding' and 'unfolding', which the artist explores as interconnected practices. At the center is his search for the "inexpressible": the urgency to create a language as delicate as the walk of a tightrope walker in which the movement is much more than dynamic, it is full of a tension that evokes emotions and perceptions" .
The exhibition opens with two installations: 134.9 m³ (2000-2018) and 81 m² (2002-2018), which subtly introduce the themes of the exhibition. Within the portion of space delimited by the one-degree inclined lines of these two installations, the textual work is glimpsed Science of Communication #1 – A Study on How to Make Myself Understood (2000), which bears witness to the artist's interest in language and translation in the processes of cultural and social integration. In contrast to the first room, the central space of the exhibition is occupied by Citadel (2011), a large installation made up of 176 Venetian blinds: a multisensory environment made up of complex modular structures, crossed by the visitors who move inside it and by a hypnotic choreography of lights.
From there to the murals of the series Trustworthiness (2010 – ongoing). In this important cycle of works Yang combines different graphic materials, envelopes with printed patterns, his very personal reworking of graph paper (Grid Block) and reflective vinyls. in the same room, two performative sculptures from the series Dress Vehicles (2018), produced for the occasion, "dance" in space.
“In Haegue Yang's continuous experimentation – explain the organizers of the exhibition – the casual encounter with an object or a material can generate shapes, unexpected emotions and narrations, and to articulate an ambivalent spatiality, accessible and inaccessible at the same time, in which the denial of acquired knowledge always coincides with the opening of new perspectives”.
“We are very happy to have found in an Italian institution of such great prestige as the Triennale, a point of reference for the cultural life of the city and the country, the second partner of this new and ambitious path undertaken with the Furla Series – declared Giovanna Furlanetto, President of the Furla Foundation. With Haegue Yang's exhibition we are presenting research whose linguistic and creative complexity is the perfect synthesis of the plurality of experiences that contemporary art can offer.”
“The basis of this collaboration between the Triennale and the Furla Foundation – he said Stefano Boeri, President of the Milan Triennale – there is a common interest in contemporary languages. We are happy to host the second edition of the Furla Series project and the first solo exhibition in Italy of the artist Haegue Yang, whose works and installations will give life to an unprecedented dialogue that will involve the spaces of the Palazzo dell'Arte and its visitors.”
