Haegue Yang. Photo by Kevin Todora, courtesy of the Nasher Sculpture Center

Hyperallergic has praised the sculpture of South Korean artist Haegue Yang for the ways it effortlessly combines “references to Western art history, domestic design, non-Western spiritual practices, meteorology, folk traditions and globalized trade.” Last month, Yang opened two major shows at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and her gallery, kurimanzutto, in Mexico City. In town for ZONAMACO, Observer caught up with the artist in CDMX to hear more about both of these ambitious exhibitions.

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The show “Arcane Abstractions” includes both sculptures and two-dimensional works, while the Nasher Sculpture Center is known primarily for sculpture. Let’s start by discussing “Lost Lands and Sunken Fields” at the Nasher. How do you view your work within the context of this medium?

Just to give a bit of background, the initial discussion about the possibility of an exhibition at the Nasher as well as the presentation of my last solo exhibition at kurimanzutto, titled “Ornament and Abstraction,” were seven years ago. Both exhibitions have gone through a long gestation period, and many things have happened personally, professionally and in the world during that time. My production has also transformed and evolved greatly. Those seven years allowed me to develop far enough to feel a necessity to make entirely new sculptures.

Especially for the Nasher, I developed enough trust in the curator and institution to propose exhibiting entirely new works instead of typical sculptures. And in the show at kurimanzutto, I dared to include archival materials and documentation from field trips, as well as loaned artifacts and rare materials from the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City, next to my own works, which can be seen as taboo in a solo show at a gallery. As the sources of my productions are revealed through archival materials on anthropological topics, this show appears hybrid. If it had been three or four years earlier, I wouldn’t have dared to show my works next to those research materials.

What changed?

I see myself as a sculptor, and sculpture-making is central to my practice. And I was pushing myself beyond what I had already begun or have previously done. There were two key turning points—around 2006 and then in 2018 or 2019—in my internal flow of development. Those turning points, which resulted in adventurous works, often coincided with encounters with certain institutional curators. And my growing trust in them generated opportunities for daring experimentations. When I said, as it happened at the Nasher, that “I want to do something small and light,” I could rely on the trust and support of the curator Leigh Arnold to shape my vision.