Leap Year: Haegue Yang’s Eccentric Sensory Exploration of Folklore & Modernism

The South Korean artist experiments with poetic reinterpretations of everyday objects at the Hayward Gallery’s newest immersive exhibition. 

Installation view of Haegue Yang: Leap Year, 2024. Photo: Sheraz Zingraff. Courtesy of the artist and the Hayward Gallery.

Noted for being the first major UK survey of the internationally celebrated artist, Leap Year explores Yang’s practice of seeing the extraordinary in everyday objects with a comprehensive study of her work from the early 2000s to today. Each room serves as an invitation to reimage and redefine with displays of mundane articles such as blinds, envelopes, and drying racks, all animated with new meaning through her immersive, spellbinding practices. Playing with notions of cross-cultural pollination and modernism, careful methodologies lie within the manipulation and awakening of objects yet simultaneously a simplistic casualty in their character. 

Installation view of Haegue Yang: Leap Year, 2024. Photo: Sheraz Zingraff. Courtesy of the artist and the Hayward Gallery.

Upon first entering the beguiling mind of the South Korean artist, you are met with a physical interruption, a veil of industrialisation. Composed of dangling chains, the curtain is clustered with glistening blue and silver stainless steel balls. Sonic reverberations echo behind their crisp and awakening touch, engulfing you within the multidimensional experimental realms of Yang’s imagination. Gliding into the physical vacuum signals the reconceptualising and curiosity lying ahead in the distortion of the familiar. 

Installation view of Haegue Yang: Leap Year, 2024. Photo: Sheraz Zingraff. Courtesy of the artist and the Hayward Gallery.

Unifying collections of both industrial and craft materials, Yang responds to context and site through poetically implicit storytelling, experimenting with elements that connect to the place while touching on broader geographies. Moving between the varied rooms within the South London Gallery, mechanical architectural interventions such as sculptures covered in artificial straw sprouting from bulbous forms illustrate the artist's unrestraint with experimentation. Leap Year’s display of eccentricity features multimedia installations spanning a vast range of media, curated from some of the artist’s most prominent series, including Light Sculptures, Sonic Sculptures, The Intermediates, and Dress Vehicles.

Installation view of Haegue Yang: Leap Year, 2024. Photo: Sheraz Zingraff. Courtesy of the artist and the Hayward Gallery.

The unfolding of Yang’s multifaceted artistry illuminates juxtapositions in texture and form, paralleling the liberty in experimentation with underlying melancholic connotations woven into her quirky designs. Beyond the unconventional physicality of the sensorial installations lie societal critiques on how ordinary people live out of sync with the unnatural environments forced upon them. Explorations on ecological awareness, imbued with touches of despondency, traverse conversational terrains on the impositions of colonialism and consumerism.

Installation view of Haegue Yang: Leap Year, 2024. Photo: Sheraz Zingraff. Courtesy of the artist and the Hayward Gallery.

Outlandish sculptures dominate, embellished with more subdued presentations, including shrine-like compositions made of origami paper and video montages. The artists' exuberant productions are met with sonic recordings whispering amongst the gallery’s winding trails and open spaces, each serving as a pocket of selected narrative works. Mirroring the medley of methods and channels of her expression, Yang’s inspiration draws on diverse histories and cultures, notably East Asian rituals, folklore, modernism, and ecological infrastructures.

Installation view of Haegue Yang: Leap Year, 2024. Photo: Sheraz Zingraff. Courtesy of the artist and the Hayward Gallery.

When speaking of the cultural resonance and tenderness in the vulnerability Yang offers in her multi-sensory installations, Hayward Gallery Senior Curator Yung Ma shared that the leading contemporary artist 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 is on exhibition at the Hayward Gallery from 9 October 2024 to 5 January 2025.