Installation artist Haegue Yang believes in the "hiddenness" of stories. Using sight, sound, heat, wind, light -- sometimes even scent -- she seeks to create a sense of narrative by transmuting intimate experience into abstract sensory environments.
A Korean who lives in Berlin, Yang has created the latest such exploration in her first solo show in the U.S., "Asymmetric Equality," at the REDCAT Gallery in Walt Disney Concert Hall through Aug. 24.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday, July 17, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 33 words Type of Material: Correction
Haegue Yang: An article in Wednesday's Calendar section about artist Haegue Yang's installation at the Gallery at REDCAT described Clara Kim as the gallery's acting director. She is the permanent director and curator.
In the darkened space on a recent weekday, the petite and slim artist, dressed in a black jacket and jeans, was overseeing the final touches to an expansive amalgam of shifting patterns of shadow and light, mirror imagery, sound and warring sources of heat and air.
The multimedia installation is the manifestation of an unspoken narrative about private and public intersections, inspired by visits to L.A. for her REDCAT residency and by her interest in the emotional geography of colonialism. The late French novelist Marguerite Duras, born in Indochina, was another influence, Yang said.
"Most of the referential stories I'm interested in have something to do with my own experiences and perception," she explained.
For example, in the recent "Siblings and Twins" in Frankfurt, Germany, her focus was Duras' Paris apartment, where the young writer's guests planned political actions and shared experiences and "intellectual thought."
"There was a very blurred barrier between protected privateness and public engagement," Yang said.
At REDCAT, that barrier is suggested once again -- this time by open horizontal blinds hanging in branch-like formations and flanked by snaking vines of looped wires connected overhead to heat lamps and electric fans.
Lights, blood-red and blue-white, circle the room, evoking both sun and searchlights. Shadows, oddly organic- and tropical-looking, appear and disappear on the white walls.
"I'm fascinated by the blind and its function of filtering light and creating a kind of half-transparent wall between two spaces," Yang said. "It is that space between people that I'm very interested in. You are not alone. You can see other people walking through the half-shadow, half-light. You are sharing but not sharing."
Fans and heaters are "sense devices," which in her past work have included humidifiers and scent emitters.
