Haegue Yang: Flat Works

Haegue Yang: Flat Works surveys two decades of the artist’s two-dimensional explorations, including so-called Lacquer Paintings, Hardware Store Collages, Trustworthies (abstractions made from security envelopes, sandpaper, and more), wallpapers, Spice and Vegetable prints, and finally Mesmerizing Mesh (cut and folded paper collages based on international shamanistic practices). Aspects of these series have been exhibited in the past, but never comprehensively in order to consider their cumulative impact and the throughlines across each project.

One of the most important artists working today, Yang is best known as a sculptor and installation artist. Nonetheless, she considers her two-dimensional investigations as essential to her creative development. A fundamental recognition of these series is that “flatness” registers a “collapse” of the three-dimensional world as image. The aesthetics of these investigations range from minimalist and discrete to maximalist and engulfing. The exhibition proposes to redefine Yang’s contributions through stunning and revelatory exploration of her evolving “flat” projects, with a “wallpaper” covering the entry to The Arts Club’s historic Mies van der Rohe staircase and newly conceived apparatuses for viewing and displaying Mesmerizing Mesh. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by Skira with essay by curator and scholar Orianna Cacchione, Ph.D. She explains, “The flat works are not flat at all, they are sites of compression, paradoxically revealing a depth of space. For Yang, flattening is a “synonym for abstraction” and this abstraction acts across dimensions to infiltrate and deconstruct ways of knowing in contemporary society.”

In conjunction with the exhibition, The Arts Club will host a concert of works by composer Isang Yun on Thursday, October 10 at 6pm, with a pre-concert lecture at 5:30pm.

Isang Yun wrote music that feels rhapsodic, taut, and crystalline, at times. Arrested for composing songs in Korean during the Japanese colonial period and then kidnapped for suspected espionage in Germany in the 1960s, Yun underwent a great deal of political turbulence while simultaneously garnering great acclaim for his musical accomplishments, according to artist Haegue Yang, who holds him up as an inspiring influence. Join for a concert of Yun’s piano and cello music performed by Mabel Kwan and Chris Wild of Chicago’s Ensemble Dal Niente at 6pm, and come early for a pre-concert lecture from Northwestern University professor and musicologist Ryan Dohoney to give context on ties between the artist (Yang) and the composer (Yun).