When Haegue Yang was in Germany a couple of years in the past, she grew to become fascinated by a neighborhood ironmongery store, or extra particularly its catalogue. She made a sequence of collages by chopping it up, together with one wherein rolls of brown packing paper are organized in a star-like symmetrical sample. And that’s it. The Hayward’s retrospective of this 53-year-old South Korean is filled with stuff like this. It’s immense, crowded and utterly unrewarding. None of it provides up and none of it’s transferring – until you’re the sort of one that tears up over a venetian blind. “Venetian blinds are a outstanding characteristic,” says a wall textual content, explaining Yang’s work. “She is especially drawn to their tilted slats.”
In a single set up, these tilted slats cowl the perimeters of illuminated containers. It comes as a shock whenever you learn that this neutral-looking work is entitled 5, Rue Saint-Benoit and is supposed to recommend the Paris residence of the novelist Marguerite Duras the place she lived as a member of the resistance within the second world battle. Trying once more, you see that one of many blinded crates is painted like a tricolour. In any other case, the heavy cultural reference hangs irrelevantly within the void – and it’s not the one one.
In a brand new fee, lights play on an array of venetian blinds that recede like surroundings in a toy theatre, choreographed to the Korean composer Isang Yun’s Double Concerto for Oboe and Harp With Small Orchestra. Elsewhere, notes on steel boards muse on Primo Levi and the Holocaust, George Orwell taking pictures an elephant and Edward Mentioned on Palestine, however chopped up and moved about till any that means is misplaced.
Presumably that’s the purpose: that large concepts, grand narratives, any sort of sense in any respect can’t stand as much as the onrush of data and world complexity of our world proper now. You come into the present and it’s as loopy as a megacity. Conventional bells are dingling, sculptures dashing about – or at the very least rolling round as they’re pushed on casters by specialist sculpture-pushers. These sculptures are vibrant, difficult blobs of matting that sprout pointy nodes, tendrils and flowers, transferring over a exactly marked-out, summary flooring drawing. What’s this all about? Search me.
Or slightly, at one degree, it’s very simple to say what it’s all about: the Loopy Complexity of Our World. Or, because the Hayward has it, the “hybridity” and “interconnectivity” of latest life. The difficulty is, to say we dwell in a richly layered interconnected actuality is only a truth. Everyone knows this. Yang’s artwork doesn’t evoke a lot past the chaos and enjoyable we expertise once we go down the outlets.
She makes loads of use of collage, the approach invented by Picasso and developed by the dadaists to recommend the fragmentation of contemporary life. However there’s no filth in her collages, no wildness or randomness to shock you or make you anxious. They’re neatly trendy. One sequence makes use of cut-up envelopes to create shapes which can be rounded at one finish and sharp on the different. They’re proven over a wall-sized, black and white {photograph} of a sunny suburban panorama snappily known as Poetics of Displacement.
With such a grand, essential title it’s simple to interpret, but onerous to be bothered about. The cutout comets in fact signify peoples’ world mobility, the photograph speaks (or slightly its title does – the image itself says nothing) of “Displacement”, simply because the sculptures on wheels recommend our many migrations. In one other gallery, there’s an set up known as Storage Piece, wherein her belongings are packed away in containers. It’s not an emotive story of contemporary life, only a dull-as-dishwater picture of one thing common at this time. While you depict the fashionable world this coolly and conceptually, who cares?
Yang does give hints of her personal life. A lot is product of her first exhibition, which she staged in her grandparents’ empty outdated residence. Maybe you needed to be there. However as commemorated right here, it simply seems to be like some good lights in a decayed home. The curators clearly assume they’re telling the story of a fantastic artist, however I can see nothing to justify that reverence.
A number of Yang’s work, in reality, is fairly. So the easiest way to benefit from the present might be as cool concepts for adornment. Beneath all of the guff about interconnectivity, all of the quotes from Levi and Orwell, a really light artist is struggling to get out. You realise this whenever you attain the vegetable prints. When she is at her least pretentious, Yang enjoys making pale-coloured patterns of imprinted leaves and on a regular basis veg. They appear good, if a bit bland. She additionally makes brilliant paper cutouts that she calls Mesmerising Mesh, with intersecting patterns of triangles, masks and biomorphic shapes. Once more they’re engaging, however lack weight or depth.
This artwork says nothing to me. Not as soon as does it specific human ache or longing, or contact on the thriller of existence, or make you look a actuality within the face – it’s simply taking part in video games with itself, paradoxically juxtaposing Korean custom and fashionable banality with out a shred of poetry. All I can hear is my internal voice saying: “Pull the opposite one – it’s obtained jangly little bells on it.”
At Hayward Gallery, London, 9 October to five January