The Motley Crew of Haegue Yang’s Hybrid Sculptures

LONDON — Visitors to Haegue Yang’s Leap Year are encouraged to enter through a curtain of tiny bells, their arrival marked by tinkling metal as though opening the door to a temple, or a shop. This entrance via “Sonic Droplets in Gradation – Water Veil” (2024) offers a physical and imaginative gateway into Yang’s broader thinking around the importance of sonic reverberations, the relationship between the sacred and material realms, and the ways in which artworks might be activated by a participant.

Throughout the show, Yang displays her ability to yoke together apparently disparate references in cohesive ways, effortlessly combining references to Western art history, domestic design, non-Western spiritual practices, meteorology, folk traditions, and globalized trade. For instance, the central part of the exhibition revolves around a group of sculptures on castors made variously of reflective strips, venetian blinds, rattan, and metal bells. The surrounding walls are painted in what Yang describes as “Quasi-Yves Klein Blue” and adorned with monochrome collages of famous faces including George Orwell and Vaslav Nijinsky, while a vinyl map on the floor suggests weather patterns or balletic choreography. 

Once a week, without prior announcement, a troupe of black-clad performers walk silently up to the sculptures in this section and begin to activate them, apparently following the esoteric mapping on the floor. The pieces, which are fitted with functional metal handles, move smoothly on their castors in the quiet of the gallery space, highlighting the small sounds of the works themselves: the creak of rattan, the clinking of the pull cords on venetian blinds, and the surprisingly subtle tinkling of thousands of tiny metal bells. There is a satisfying sense of unexplained ritual in the sculptures fulfilling their latent potential. 

Elsewhere, Yang’s work further explores this idea of ritual and dormant power, such as through her series of exquisite collages, Mesmerizing Mesh (2021–ongoing), which draws on her research into Indigenous shamanic practices of paper-cutting and -folding. Crafted from hanji, a mulberry bark paper often used for mystical purposes in Korean shamanism, the works seem almost impossibly delicate, their dense material layers expressing a dazzling complexity. 

These collages are shown alongside a cluster of straw-woven anthropomorphic sculptures that appear to have stepped out of a folk celebration, drawing on traditional weaving techniques used in a variety of cultures around the world, from British May Day costumes to Korean bridal headpieces. “The Intermediates – Dancing in Woven Masks” (2015) evokes a motley crew of hybrid creatures, permanently awaiting activation, sinister and humorous in equal measure. 

After the organic and folkloric tone of these galleries, the displays in the final rooms, which primarily focus on Yang’s sculptures of venetian blinds, employ a notably more technological aesthetic. Works such as “Series of Vulnerable Arrangements – Version Utrecht” (2006), for instance, utilize heat lamps, fans, and scent atomizers to literally change the atmosphere of the gallery space, inviting viewers to consider the factors that affect how art is produced, displayed, and experienced. Across her practice as a whole, Yang is drawn to how such materials simultaneously conceal and reveal their surroundings, employing them both as tools for dividing the exhibition space and as sculptural objects in their own right. 

Haegue Yang: Leap Year continues at Hayward Gallery, London, through January 5, 2025. The exhibition is curated by Hayward Gallery Senior Curator Yung Ma with Assistant Curator Suzanna Petot and Curatorial Assistant Charlotte Dos Santos.