Haegue Yang

Haegue Yang was born in Seoul, Korea in 1971. She currently lives and works between Berlin and Seoul. Her highly sensorial installations and sculptures made with common materials and daily objects have been exhibited in numerous institutions and galleries around the world.

Haegue Yang's Medicine Men are quasi-bodies endowed with the authority of the shaman. These medicine men are made out of material culture's marginalia: clown wigs, extension cords, feather dusters strung up on chrome skeletons. The bodies glow and move across the floor on rotating wheels; they are surreal, composed of fetish objects, which raise a number of perplexing questions. Are these Medicine men mocking the superstition of the era we have emerged from to enter one of trans-national atheism? Are they a cautionary tale that we will always need human myth-makers, and that these will always be made out of beautiful trinkets? Do their inhuman bodies hold our places when they gather to establish a semblance of community, or do they replace us? Do they invite us to lay our pain and madness before them for exorcism, or do they mock us with their apparent and plastic vulnerability?