Haegue Yang | CI08 Life on Mars

Born: 1971, Seoul, South Korea
Lives and Works: Berlin and Seoul

Haegue Yang's art resists a defining medium, engaging instead with a range of means, from wall drawing to books, sculpture, installation, moving image, and photography. The oblique self-analysis that Yang uses as both strategy and substance in her "placeless" art is symptomatic of someone who has lived for many years outside of her native country and whose life and work entail the high-mobility and in-transit condition common to many contemporary artists operating internationally. This acute sense of provisional belonging--being at home in what is foreign and feeling foreign in what is home--lends Yang's work a hair-trigger sensitivity for the inflections of quotidian experience as well as public and private territories. She has described her practice in terms of a poetic activism. Three Kinds (2008) employs commonplace objects such as venetian blinds, lights, and mirrors to create an atmosphere of dramatic intimacy. Though the specific point of conceptual departure remains obscured--Yang relates this and similar installations to abstract portraits of various individuals from Asian and European history--the interaction of the elements might be seen as a stand-in for human relations.

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Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International

Widely known as one of the pre-eminent international surveys of contemporary art in the world, the Carnegie International was founded at the behest of industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1896. With the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International is the oldest such exhibition in the world. Titled "Life on Mars", the 2008 Carnegie International will focus on the increasingly relevant question of what it means to be human in the world today. The exhibition presents work by 40 artists who investigate particular aspects of the human condition, moving along paths that are both introspective and worldly while poetically traversing the dramatic spectrum from tragedy to comedy.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Art
• Carnegie
• International
• CI08
• Museum
• Carnegie-International

[maeiraldi]

what a sweet lady, her work rules. Go Haegue!