Haegue Yang lives and works between Seoul, South Korea, and Berlin, Germany. She resists one defining medium, engaging with sculpture, wall drawing, books, the moving image, photography, and installation, as in Series of Vulnerable Arrangements—Domestics of Community (2009). Frequently abstract, Yang’s forms are nonetheless replete with autobiographical and political references, and are suffused with the artist’s personal sense of place. Her approach to abstraction treats objects and formal elements as a kind of language, capable of conveying a story without conventional linear narrative. By instigating tensions between constructed forms and found objects, and phenomena such as darkness, light, and heat, Yang suggests material metaphors for the delicate connections forged in the home and in communities, between public and private realms.

With Series of Vulnerable Arrangements—Domestics of Community (2009), one must read Yang’s works—these vulnerable arrangements—through an anthropomorphizing lens. Each sculpture has its own character, defined by areas of massed material, dangling lights, awkward accumulations, and tensions of surface quality. Through these choreographed relationships between each element’s formal qualities, function, and connotative meaning, Yang overlays the intimate relationships of domestic life onto conceptions of greater political, social, and cultural community.

—Adapted from gallery label, by Dan Byers, 2010