Haegue Yang (b. Seoul, 1971) is known for her versatile works, ranging from room-scaled installations and performative sculptures to paper collages and staged performances. Yang dissociates quotidian objects and materials—like ventilators, venetian blinds, scent emitters, and clothing racks—from their mundane roles to recast them in multisensory experiences. Communicating without language in a primordial and visual way through scent, sound, light, and tactility, Yang engages the disciplines of art history, literature, and political history, and touches on themes of migration, postcolonial diaspora, enforced exile, and social mobility.

The exhibition at CAM marks Yang’s first solo museum presentation with a comprehensive selection of works in the midwest since 2009. For this exhibition, CAM is commissioning Yang to create a new work that responds to the Museum’s architecture and engages the region’s pre-colonial history and the Mississippi River landscape. Rounding out this presentation is a series of sculptures from Yang’s The Intermediates and Airborne Paper Creatures series.

Haegue Yang is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Misa Jeffereis, Associate Curator.