Haegue Yang: Strange Attractors, Tate St Ives, review: the zaniest, peppiest artworks around
What’s this? Good news, at last, from Britain’s battered cultural sector. While most museum directors are grim-faced about decimated visitor numbers, Anne Barlow at Tate St Ives is beaming. Since reopening, the gallery has been at Covid-secure capacity – even during a damp October. And if that doesn’t fill you with cheer, the gallery’s latest exhibition – its biggest installation of contemporary art since Jamie Fobert’s extension opened three years ago – will put a smile on your face.
Perhaps you haven’t heard of the Berlin-based South Korean artist Haegue Yang. Within the art world, though, there’s been a buzz about her for a while. Last year, I caught her swanky installation “Handles” inside the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. An explosive mural of silvery shards surrounded six comical, anthropomorphic sculptures on wheels, like gigantic liquorice allsorts running gleefully amok after shredding their wrapper. Two of the escapees were dead ringers for Bertie Bassett.
There are lots of similarly impish, unruly forms at Tate St Ives. Yang’s show, though, begins with a feint: a display devoted to another artist altogether. Li Yuan-chia (1929–94) was born in Guangxi, China, but ended up in Cumbria, where he converted a derelict farmhouse by Hadrian’s Wall into a gallery. Intrigued by his story, Yang presents a series of his hand-coloured photographs from the 1990s. In them, he appears as a sort of impoverished shaman, a blanket over his head, holding a broom.
Confused? I was. Still, at his gallery, Li showed work by two modernists associated with St Ives – Naum Gabo and Barbara Hepworth – both of whom are also represented in the opening room. And, it turns out, this unlikely trio inspired the three Dalek-like sculptures on casters in the cavernous adjoining gallery, a dazzling multimedia installation of new and recent work by Yang.
They’re not exactly portraits, these Daleks, more cute, playful presences imbued with antic energy. One, holding a witch’s broomstick, looks like R2-D2’s hairy cousin. That one’s Li. And here’s Gabo, with a metal turbine vent for a head, and a body of bristly black artificial straw and tiny silver sleigh bells. At least, I think it’s Gabo – or is he a Mongolian warrior, clad in chainmail and fur? He should meet British sculptor Phillip King’s rampant fibreglass Genghis Khan, from 1963: they’d get on like a house on fire – or smash each other to bits, a la Robot Wars. Hang on: parts of Yang’s sculpture swivel round a central axis. Must be Gabo, then. He had a thing for kinetics.
To evoke Hepworth, Yang stacks curvaceous, pierced shapes that were her stock-in-trade, but covers them in twine and copper-plated bells: “Three Forms” recast as Christmas baubles. It isn’t the only piece with a decorative, festive vibe. Did Boccioni, the Italian Futurist, ever make a sculpture of a Christmas tree? Yang’s “Reflected Metallic Cubist Dancing Mask” (2020), with its angular forms and flashes of wrapping-paper-like gold vinyl, shows us how it might have looked.
It’s dotty and irreverent – and great fun. Yang’s playfulness is everywhere apparent. Her titles, alone, are worth the price of admission. My favourite – for another wheeled sculpture in her series of “Intermediates” – is “Tilted Bushy Lumpy Bumpy”. This ovoid, shaggy-haired Womble of artificial straw, from 2016, has a delightfully shambling, Boris-like quality. It seems to make eyes at a potential mate: a pretty haystack wearing a fetching red raffia scarf called “Running Firecracker”. (Careful, Lumpy-Bumpy: she looks feisty.) Are they folkloric fertility gods? Yang isn’t saying. Above their heads, six “Sonic Half Moons” – spherical clusters of tiny bells, trailing tentacles – hang like jellyfish suspended in saltwater.
Occasionally, attendants “activate” them, so that they spin and tinkle, tentacles splayed. At the far end, a vast mural of kaleidoscopic wallpaper, filled with stock imagery of tumultuous seas and rocks cascading through the air like confetti, strikes a less frivolous, apocalyptic note.
What does any of it mean? My advice: just go with the flow, and savour Yang’s irrepressible, puckish energy. I left as the gallery was winding down – and imagined her hybrid forms, in their metallic glad rags, enjoying a knees-up beneath those Sonic Half Moons, shimmering like glitter balls and shaking their trailing skirts. Which made me happy – and what’s wrong with that? After the year we’ve had, feeling uplifted by art is, surely, something to cherish.
From Oct 24 until May 3 2021. Information: tate.org.uk
