New monograph, devoted to Haegue Yang's "Mesmerizing Mesh" series, which dwelves into "Sacred Paper Cutting", a Korean shamanastic ritual which has inspired many of her recent projects.
For several years, Haegue Yang has been studying the ambivalent relationship between spirit and matter and investigating mystical practices, from European paganism to Asian shamanism. In recent years, his interest has turned to different paper-cutting traditions, particularly the sacred dimension of hanji, a traditional Korean paper made by hand from mulberry pulp, from which the Mesmerizing Mesh series is inspired. After their meeting in Paris, during the opening of the exhibition at the Chantal Crousel Gallery in 2022, Haegue Yang and Nicolas Bureau had the conversation that accompanies the works reproduced in this book. Together they talked about shamanism, travel, artists' and anthropologists' status, and transcending the boundaries between fields of knowledge.
Nicolas Bureau is an anthropologist who has been studying human-animal relations among animist populations for several years. During his thesis work, carried out under the direction of Philippe Descola and Charles Stépanoff at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, he spent several months with the Siberian Evens, a Tungus people practicing nomadic pastoralism, sharing with them the lifestyle of reindeer herders.
Haegue Yang (born 1971 in Seoul, lives and works in Berlin and Seoul) is one of the most influential Korean artists of her generation. Using several media, from collage to performance, she explores the sensual and formal properties of everyday objects and materials (venetian blinds, fans, infrared detection devices, etc.), taken out of their original context and rearranged into abstract compositions, investing them with a new, poetic meaning with political or emotional overtones. Her often abstract constructions are in fact sensory experiences whose crux is an implicit critique of the modern.
Haegue Yang represented South Korea at the 2009 Venice Biennale. She has also shown at Documenta (Kassel), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the ICA (Boston), the Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul), the 13th Lyon Biennale...
Haegue Yang has been awarded the 2018 Wolfgang Hahn Prize.
