Haegue Yang at Galerie Chantal Crousel
For the previous two years, Haegue Yang, lengthy recognized for her Venetian blinds and modular bell installations, has re-animated an missed medium: paper cutouts. Yang’s new, delightfully expressive paper collages are a significant inventive flip—to make use of her phrases, a leap.
“Mesmerizing Mesh—Paper Leap and Resonating Habitat” brings collectively nineteen paper collages and new sculptures. The flat cut-out compositions, which appear to bloom in tessellated patterns, are made with conventional hanji, or mulberry paper. Framed and mounted behind glass, they include sharp, detailed imagery that cuts like fangs: ghostly transparencies, robotic or animistic monsters, praying mantises, crabs and bulls, unknown beasts that spew leaves like hearth. While you step again, some look skeletal, as if plucked from a Day of the Lifeless procession. They conjure the sensations of re-animation, possession, reincarnation, and exorcism.
Yang’s “Mesmerizing Mesh” sequence is the results of contact with shamans who make use of cutouts in efficiency rituals for therapeutic, spells, and commemoration. In modern Korea, shamans are, paradoxically, each revered and socially marginalized. Politically, Yang is excited about shamanism as a counter-authoritative apply. But, her view is syncretic, knowledgeable by Shinto, Slavic, Korean, Japanese, Mexican, Jewish, and North Indian paper-cutting legacies (as evidenced by the library of specialist literature that’s displayed within the gallery.)
Yang’s apply is rooted in her persevering with analysis into craft, philosophy, literature, perception, and even on remoted historic figures. Uniting the works’ floor intricacies is a looking out philosophy of abstraction, one which gleefully flouts the dogmas of European modernism. Like her earlier installations, Yang’s newest sequence is unshackled from the acquainted chokeholds of that canon—in its arbitrary splitting of use and decoration, of instrumentality and autonomy. Yang repurposes craft not solely as an embodied type of spiritualism, and hardly as a restoration of the previous, however as a generative labor of affection. The result’s paper magic.
