Haegue Yang: Journal of Bouba/kiki

Glasgow Sculpture Studios (GSS) is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work, Journal of Bouba/kiki, by Korean artist Haegue Yang, borne out of a three-month production residency that the artist undertook at GSS from June until September 2013. This residency provided Yang with space for research, development and the production of new work. The exhibition will be the first time that her work has been shown in Scotland.

The artist’s long-standing interests in the economy of labour, fabrication, movement, handicraft and abstraction have a continued presence in this exhibition. Examining what ‘production’ means in terms of an artist’s practice today, Yang brings together a variety of working methods. Her works range from complex installations using high-end fabrication with industrially produced and commercially available products, to hand-made sculptures and objects using traditional handicraft techniques. The handicraft pieces made from craft techniques such as knitting, paper making, origami and macramé are typically considered to be amateur, quotidian and less labour intensive, when compared to the conceptual and technologically advanced processes involved with her larger installations. This apparent opposition could be read as dialectic however, Yang sees them as a complementary combination. Yang is an artist that continuously pushes the boundaries of her practice engaging with new methodologies and ways of making. Using the idea of a ‘production’ residency as a challenge to her own efficiency, where she is away from her usual safe environment of the studio, the artist has embraced GSS’ extensive range of processes and facilities for working to create an exciting and dynamic new body of work.

The exhibition will bring together four new projects by Yang, developed entirely at GSS, with one pre-existing work that was produced during another production residency undertaken by the artist at Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI), Singapore in November 2012. A major new venetian blind installation, Three Folds and Multiple Twists 2013, forms the central part of her presentation. Yang’s interest in blinds stem in part from their limited function – they are made to simply conceal and to reveal – and yet she continually finds new ways to experiment with their configuration. In this installation a number of the lower blinds subtly twist in accordance with a choreographed programme. This presents a sensory experience for the viewer, as their perspective is altered as they encounter the work from various positions within the gallery. These twisting blinds further develops Yang’s interest in the mechanical movement of blinds, which was first seen in her major installation Approaching: Choreography Engineered in Never-Past Tense2012 at last year’s dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany. At GSS however, the movement is minimal, delicate and intimate, reflecting upon the environment of the white gallery space as opposed to a hard-edged industrial setting. The title of the work, Three Folds and Multiple Twists, reflects the configuration in the space as the installation wraps around three columns of the main exhibition space.