The Arts Club of Chicago is pleased to present Haegue Yang: Flat Works, a defining exhibition marking the artist’s first North American retrospective to survey the artist’s two-dimensional explorations over the last three decades. Through a select number of key works, the ambitious exhibition identifies underlying connections and motivations across the artist’s oeuvre, offering a scholarly perspective on this aspect of Yang’s career for the first time.

Haegue Yang: Flat Works includes 58 works from seven series: Hardware Store Collages, Lacquer Paintings, Non-Foldings, Trustworthies (abstractions made from security envelopes and other materials), Wallpapers, Edibles, and most recently, Mesmerizing Mesh (cut and folded paper collages based on varied, international shamanistic practices). These diverse investigations have accompanied Yang’s practice in three dimensions—including her iconic venetian blind installations and remarkable sonic sculptures with metallic bells—and have been presented in all of her major exhibitions. Until now, however, they have never been comprehensively explored on their own. Pointing to the cumulative impact of these two-dimensional works, this exhibition unearths through-lines across Yang’s many diverse projects. Formed around the key word “flat,” it provides a rich but rare insight into Yang’s conceptual map.

One of the most important artists working today, Yang is predominantly known as a sculptor and installation artist. Nonetheless, her two-dimensional investigations have been consistent and essential to her creative development. A fundamental recognition of these series is that “flatness” registers a collapse of the three-dimensional world as image. The aesthetics of these investigations range from minimalist and discrete to maximalist and engulfing.

Yang’s revelatory exploration of “flat” projects is still evolving—and the exhibition at The Arts Club of Chicago offers both landmark and recent materials that attest to this process. Yang hangs an excerpt from a room-scaled wallpaper on the vitrine surrounding The Arts Club of Chicago’s classic Mies van der Rohe staircase, while an elaborate wooden trellis is newly conceived to display collages from the Mesmerizing Mesh series with related archival research undertaken by the artist. Both the vitrine and the trellis show the evolving energy of Yang’s creative practice by compressing or exploding the space of the exhibition, which produces a sense of dimensional shift.

Haegue Yang: Flat Works was organized by Executive Director and Chief Curator Janine Mileaf and supported by gifts to the Arts Club Ambition Fund from the Smart Family Foundation and Individual Donors.

Opening: September 18, 2024 from 6:00 – 8:00 pm

Special Event: October 10, 2024 at 6:00 pm, Evening Concert

Celebrated musicians Chris Wild and Mabel Kwan will perform works for cello and piano by 20th-century Korean Composer Isang Yun (1917-1995) with a pre-concert lecture by musicologist Ryan Dohoney. Yang has been invested in Isang Yun for many years and a handout of her text work, titled A Chronology of Conflated Dispersion – Duras and Yun (2018) will accompany this musical event.

Publication: Haegue Yang: Flat Works

An accompanying fully-illustrated, 96-page hardcover catalog will be published by Skira. Essential to this publication is the pioneering and illuminating scholarship of Dr. Orianna Cacchione through her substantial essays and annotations to each of the seven categories of flat works. Designed by Chicago-based David Khan-Giordano, this publication delivers a long-awaited book-length investigation of the flat works. Major support is provided by Kukje Gallery, Seoul, with additional support from kurimanzutto, New York and Mexico City, and Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin.

Image: Haegue Yang, Splashing Volcano Ash Gaze – Mesmerizing Mesh, Hanji on alu-dibond, framed. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Studio Haegue Yang

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