S.M.A.K. is honoured to be the first museum in Belgium to present a solo exhibition by the internationally renowned artist Haegue Yang (b. 1971, Seoul). Entitled Several Reenactments, the exhibition pivots on notions of recurrence as well as Yang’s preoccupation with doubling, mirroring, and dividing. In her work, Yang seeks out the obscure, mysterious and yet inherently logical qualities of repetition. A process of continuous and intensive circling creates a strong intercontextuality in her practice, to the extent that her works often appear as pairs or interconnected groups. In the Cabinet Galleries on either side of the main hall, which mirror each other, Yang creates displays that are nearly symmetrical. In the central gallery, she presents a reenactment of an earlier sculptural ensemble.

The exhibition provides an account of Yang’s sculpture, which possesses a remarkably rich materiality, being primarily composed of industrially manufactured objects that are employed with craft-based techniques. Several Reenactments introduces the seemingly oppositional dialectics that run throughout her oeuvre, most notably the artisanal and rigorous treatment of ready-mades. Other paired concepts that come to the fore at S.M.A.K. are abstraction and figuration, the artificial and the organic, traditional and futuristic. These coupled themes constantly mirror each other. Yang’s exhibition is in line with her artistic practice, unfolding in an institutional context, while proposing a discreet yet resolute artistic commitment in response to the urgent global issues surrounding migration, identity, and community. Excavating from unexpected, even imagined encounters, complex cross-linkages, and sometimes contradictory and disparate translations of forms, lives, cultures, eras, traditions, and practices, she unearths in the here and now shared meanings and distils plausible contemporary entities.

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