Wind of nostalgia

Yang Hae-gue’s “An Opaque Wind” / Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation

By Kwon Mee-yoo

SHARJAH, United Arab Emirates — Korean artist Yang Hae-gue presents "An Opaque Wind," an artwork that reveals her nomadic and conceptual characteristics combined with the history of the rapidly developing Middle East at Sharjah Biennial 12 (SB12).

She recently opened a major solo exhibition at Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul in February before flying into Sharjah to put the finishing touches to her newly commissioned work for the biennial.

Yang's piece "An Opaque Wind" is displayed in one of the traditional buildings in Sharjah's Heritage Area. The installation remotely resembles a rooftop of a Korean apartment with vents on brick pedestals and wire meshes. However, a blighted palm tree in the center gives exotic sentiments, reminiscent of Korean workers who headed to the Gulf to participate in construction works from 1970s to the 80s and immigrant workers' nostalgia in general.

Another part of the artwork is a semi-open room with a television playing Korean dramas through satellite broadcasting, foreign language newspapers and buzzing electric fans. Yang even created a lookout in the courtyard, providing a good view of the artwork, as well as a panoramic view of the Arabic city of modern buildings and decorative mosques.

"When I was invited by SB12's curator Eungie Joo, I first thought of what is the significance for me to present an artwork here, before paying a visit to the site," Yang said at an interview with The Korea Times during the opening of SB12 last week. "Contemporary Arabic artists opened their eyes to their regionality and I wanted to communicate with them and contribute to the art scene in a bigger picture. I have lived nomadic life for a long time and sensitive to communication between different cultures.”

Yang said Joo is a curator who suggests self-challenging themes to artists and embraced them in the context of the exhibition.

“The site-specific project was adventurous for me but it was also inevitable to move on to the next phase,” Yang said. “I used hard, industrial materials, but wanted to create an intimate atmosphere at the same time. It resonates with the common memory of industrialization in an outdoor space. It is a new, sympathetic vocabulary of Yang Hae-gue.”

A large part of Sharjah's population consists of foreign workers from South East Asia and less-developed Urdu-speaking countries and Yang found similarity between the migrant workers and Korean workers who were stationed in the Middle East decades ago. "The city built on a desert has irony in it and the sentiment of Diaspora is widespread in the town."

The work has many layers including the totemic vent and brick structure, traditional Arabic architecture, with a Sharjah cityscape as a backdrop. “These layers overlap within the artwork, making it ‘opaque,’” Yang said. “Each layer communicates with others, but they don’t necessarily result in a consensus. The buzzing wind comes from clashes of alien materials.”