The Hayward Gallery will present Haegue Yang: Leap Year, the first major UK survey of the internationally celebrated artist from 9 October 2024 to 5 January 2025. Considered to be one of the leading artistic voices of her generation, Yang’s work is both spellbinding and boundary-pushing, probing into contemporary ideas of cross-cultural pollination, modernism and folk traditions, and personal and political histories. Leap Year will illuminate Yang’s multifaceted, interdisciplinary and highly inventive practice from the early 2000s to today, echoing the Hayward Gallery’s mission, as part of the creative engine of the Southbank Centre, to champion artists from across the world whose ideas challenge and spark new ways of thinking.
Arranged into five thematic zones, the exhibition will include three major new commissions and several new productions to present a visual and sensory experience through installation, sculpture, collage, text, video, wallpaper and sound. Yang’s artwork often transforms everyday domestic items and industrial objects, from drying racks and light bulbs to nylon pom-poms and hand-knitted yarn, into distinctive sculptures and multimedia installations that engage the senses. Leap Year will feature key works from some of her most notable series including Light Sculptures, Sonic Sculptures, The Intermediates, Dress Vehicles, Mesmerizing Mesh and the Venetian blind installations.
Newly commissioned Sonic Droplets in Gradation – Water Veil (2024) is part of Yang’s ongoing Sonic Sculptures (2013 – ) series. Visitors will be invited to walk through a curtain of blue and silver stainless-steel bells which trigger sonic reverberations, signalling their arrival. The materiality of the work is steeped in layers of references, from East Asian traditions and folklore to modernism, contemporary art history and nature, and it will act as a physical gateway into an artistic world imagined by Yang.
Modular structures, geometries and movements are some of the main considerations in Yang’s practice. Sonic Dress Vehicle – Hulky Head (2018) and Sol LeWitt Vehicle – 6 Unit Cube on Cube without a Cube (2018) are two large sculptures adorned with bells, macramé surfaces or blinds. These artworks will be activated intermittently during the exhibition’s run; pushed and pulled on a floor vinyl that is inspired by meteorological charts.
Yang’s recent work investigates the relationship between matter and spirituality. Working with mulberry paper, Yang explores the use of this material in ancient belief systems and practices. In her series of collages, Mesmerizing Mesh (2021 – ), the artwork references sacred and ritualistic paper objects related to shamanism and folk or pagan traditions, while The Intermediates (2015 – ) features hybrid ‘creature-like’ sculptures made from artificial straw that draws from global weaving techniques.
The exhibition will also re-present and reimagine Sadong 30 (2006) after 18 years. This project was set in Yang’s unoccupied family home for 8 years outside Seoul. Carrying the house’s address as the project title, Sadong 30 was the artist’s first solo show in her home country. It was also regarded as her most profound breakthrough, leading to many of her future artistic developments.
Leap Year will also feature reflections on domesticity, intimacy and everyday gestures and objects. Series of Vulnerable Arrangements – Version Utrecht (2006) is Yang’s first and seminal work made with Venetian blinds, which has become one of her most iconic and recognisable mediums. Yang is drawn to Venetian blinds for their obliqueness, semi-transparent quality, and their capacity to divide and configure a space.
Leap Year will conclude with an ambitious new commission of a large-scale Venetian blind installation, Star-Crossed Rendezvous after Yun (2024). This work features ascending layers of Venetian blinds in varying formations and colours that guide visitors through the space, alongside two breathing stage lights and a historic musical score. Yang’s work often highlights underrepresented, even obscured, yet pioneering and referential figures of modernism. This new artwork was inspired by Double Concerto (1977), created by the late Korean composer and political dissident Isang Yun (1917-1995). Other 20th-century figures appearing in her oeuvre include Marguerite Duras, Sol LeWitt, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Félix González-Torres and Yves Klein, amongst others.
An accompanying catalogue with full illustrations will be published, including two newly commissioned essays by Hayward Gallery Senior Curator Yung Ma and art writer Pablo Larios. Designed by Wolfe Hall, the catalogue will also feature an interview with the artist by curator and art historian Lynne Cooke and an illustrated chronology by the Taipei-based graphic and visual artist Chihoi.
Yung Ma, Senior Curator of the Hayward Gallery, says: “Haegue Yang has consistently sought to expand our perception of what it means to be culturally fluid or socio-politically engaged artistically, creating series after series of works that are at once sensual, expressive and captivating. Leap Year strives to be a true reflection of Yang’s vision, weaving together disparate threads that juxtapose histories of recent and ancient pasts with personal experiences and the contemporary condition to give visitors a deeply sensitive, engaging and enthralling experience.”