Born in South Korea in 1971, Haegue Yang is renowned for creating immersive environments from a diverse range of materials. Yang’s sculptures and installations conjure abstract narratives which play with our sensory pre-conceptions of scent, sound, light and tactility. Often using recognisable household objects, her work liberates forms from their functional context and applies new connotations and meanings to them. Interweaving industrially made objects with labour intensive and craft-based processes, Yang articulates her interest in folk and pagan cultures, and their deep connection with seasonal rituals in relation to natural phenomena. For this book and its accompanying exhibition at Tate St Ives, the context of the Cornish landscape and its ancient archaeological heritage is an important point of departure for Yang, whose work combines materials, theories and cultural references to make astute and surprising connections between local contexts and wider geographies and histories. Recurring themes of migration, postcolonial diasporas, political struggle and social mobility underpin Yang’s research, culminating in a body of work that is an apposite comment on our own time.
