contemporary monkey

Haegue Yang "Escaping Transparency" (photo: Edmund Blok)

Buildings occupy such a large part of our physical and emotional world, so it’s no surprise they’re used as symbols for modernism; good or bad. Films like Batman, Blade Runner, The Italian Job, or any romCom shot in New York, often use cityscapes to dramatise the story, issuing viewers with a visual clue for anticipated moments. That, and the attached music score invariably supply metropolitan centres with their own personas, and another layer in the composition. Buildings are, literally and figuratively, what we make of them.

Haegue Yang is an artist who works her way down these alleys, following earlier guides like Dan Graham and Isa Genzken as art attempted, in the past, to respond to modern architecture. Graham focussed on architecture’s affects on us, with viewers becoming essential to the work. Genzken, more bluntly, felt that Modernism was complicit in creating today’s vulgar consumerism. For Genzken, Modernism proved to be a disaster. Haegue’s work, currently showing at Modern Art Oxford until 4 September, chooses a little of both artists, but perhaps Graham played a larger influence.

Haegue’s predecessors chose sculpture, albeit composed of different materials, to convey their conversation with architecture. Fighting fire with fire, as it were. Graham used a balance of transparent or mirrored walls alongside natural surroundings to imbue a sense of self inside both built and natural environments. Genzken meanwhile used found objects to collage into dubious structures evoking a sense of near-collapse in manmade structures. Graham wanted you to come in and explore; Genzken would rather topple the thing on you.

"Escaping Transparency" (photo: Stuart Whipps)

Like Graham, some of Haegue’s work employs translucency through the permeability of window blinds which yield the possibility of a partial peek inside a scene. In wall-mounted light sculptures, she arranges faux portals where viewers wouldn’t expect to find a window-like opening. “Bedroom Radiator” and “Kitchen Boiler” are examples of works that replace common household amenities with box structures of brightly-lit bulbs, cloaked by a facade of half-opened, mono-coloured blinds.

In other works, “Dress Vehicles”, Haegue encourages viewers to climb inside rolling polygons of mini-blind structures, wheeling them around the room as participant-driver. It’s like wearing your own fashion statement, as you preen along the catwalk. True to Graham, finding yourself in the structure is more enlightening than critiquing from the outside. You feel both vulnerable and powerful behind partially shut, aluminium window armour, with a footprint of about ten feet. You could do some serious damage with these vehicles, if it weren’t for the permeability of your own identity.

Like fashion for windows (photo: Edmund Blok or Stuart Whipps, or somebody)

In yet another work called “Escaping Transparency”, polygons of blinds float completely off the ground into MAO’s rafters, thus cancelling any transparent or even semi-transparent effects the materials would have established had they been at eye level. This work is probably closer to Haegue’s true nature, dispensing a point of view not normally seen. Born in South Korea and working in Berlin, her peripatetic life probably enabled her to gain distance from local customs, yielding outside perspectives.

“Escaping Transparency” is a tidy ending to these see-through models. Lifting the structure completely off the ground and into the heavens allows the slate to be wiped clean, and begin the next evolution of habitable structure. A new conversation begins.

From an earlier exhibition...no doubt, the girl like the blinds.