Haegue Yang
Office Voodoo
In addition to Haegue Yang’s signature drying rack and light bulbs, Office Voodoo includes various office supplies like CDs, paper clips, headphones, a computer mouse, a stamp, a hole puncher, a mobile phone charger. The installation suggests the personal, physical, psychological, and political dimensions of the modern office environment. Though abstracted from their original contexts, these materials are still formally recognizable and function as stand-ins for the places from which they came.
Haegue Yang is one of the leading international artists of her generation. From mundane objects and materials such as venetian blinds, theatrical and decorative lights, infrared heaters, scent emitters, and fans, Yang creates complex and nuanced installations that are informed by poetry, politics, and human emotions. Her works explore hidden spaces that might be considered marginal, but to the artist constitute profound backdrops for understanding vulnerable sites where informal development can occur. In her works, artificial approximations of sensual experiences — heat, light, smell, and humidity—conjure other places, other people. Yang’s work captivates precisely because of its ambiguity, which is rooted as much in the conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s as it is in current theoretical discourses.