I am interested in creating a Taoist space composed of bits and pieces of reality and of the self. Together, the parts constitute a fantastic field where mystic and unreal things—such as transformation, telepor-tation, and juxtaposition—can evolve and unfold freely.—HAEGUE YANG
In Multiple Mourning Room: Mirrored, Haegue Yang has arranged reproductions of her sculpture and collages, as well as bonsai trees and Shinto grave markers, across a manipulated photograph of Hiroshima. At the top of the mural a beacon seems to hover: a protruding wall-mounted sculpture, itself composed of myriad items. The illogical spaces Yang creates signal for her the division between identity and place that typifies our mobile, diasporic world.
The title Multiple Mourning Room, which alludes to airport terminal multifaith prayer rooms, highlights the copious hours travelers idle in airports, the quintessential symbol of the transience of our age. Throughout her work, Yang uses everyday materials to focus our attention on the increasingly disordered and diverse contemporary visual environment. In some instances, she saturates our visual field: flamboyant, totemic assemblages of store-bought and handmade
stuff—light bulbs and cords, knitted textiles, plastic plants, feathers, and garish wigs—are precariously arranged atop skeletal, wheeled clothing racks or attached to wire screens. In others, Yang follows an idiosyncratic tailoring procedure, making geometric paper collages out of recycled security envelopes she has cut up, or installations that bisect, transform, and articulate space with Venetian blinds. Many of these objects are reproduced in Multiple Mourning Room. Like all her works, this one is at once playful and melancholic, sincere, and wry.