Författare: Martin Lang Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader in Fine Art

Leap Year, a new exhibition of work by South Korean artist Haegue Yang at the Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery, is a bold and diverse display of contemporary art, mixing materials and ideas in unexpected ways.

Those with a knowledge of art history over the last 70 years, like me, will appreciate how Yang plays with and combines various art traditions. For example, her use of LED, neon strip-lights, steel, text, projected video and even smell are deliberate references to materials commonly used in contemporary art.

Yang’s art isn’t particularly “Korean”, but why should it be? Like many artists from around the world, Yang has been influenced by western pop culture. Coca-Cola and Hollywood movies have been as much part of life in South Korea since the Korean war as in Britain. While some see this as a downside of globalisation, many in South Korea embrace these influences, seeing them as a sign of progress. This fusion of cultures is a fact of life for Yang, and it runs through her art.

In the wall text at the exhibition, Yang claims to have developed a “culturally hybrid visual language”. Her work references modernism, minimalism and conceptual art. Large black-and-white photo collages that bring to mind early 20th-century dada art (a post-war movement that was anti-bourgeois and often satirical and nonsensical) provide the backdrop for sculptures mounted on wheeled frames, reminiscent of stage sets or even fairground rides.

Another resembles a shower cubicle, but with grab handles on the outside. The title, Sol LeWitt Vehicle, points to the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt. Geometric floor patterns recall the work of Gabriel Orozco, another well-known contemporary artist. In one room, the walls are painted in a blue that’s close to Yves Klein’s famous International Klein Blue (a shade of pure ultramarine he claimed to have invented and which features in his most famous works), although the paint was sourced locally by gallery staff.

Connecting with tradition

Yang is particularly interested in the ways contemporary art connects with older folk and craft traditions. For example, she explores weaving practices from different cultures, even working with Filipino artisans. These pieces sit alongside Reflected Red-Blue Cubist Dancing Mask, a sculpture that takes inspiration from how early cubist artists saw African masks as pure aesthetic objects, rather than ritualistic tools.

Yang’s interpretation has wheels and handles, allowing it to be worn and used performatively, restoring its function, but with a modernist aesthetic twist.

Her interest in folk traditions goes deeper. During the COVID lockdown in Seoul, she began exploring paper cutting, a traditional Korean craft often linked with shamanic rituals. From there, she expanded her research to include paper-cutting practices from other parts of the world, like wycinanki from eastern Europe and amate from Mexico.

In her Mesmerising Mesh series, she uses traditional Korean paper (hanji), as well as Japanese washi and graph paper, to create intricate collages. The wooden structures she builds around these works resemble shrines from different cultures. Though some viewers might think of them as something more familiar, like the decor in a western Chinese restaurant. In fact, these designs were inspired by the Hmong people of Southeast Asia.

In the west, since the second world war, the idea of universal art has often been viewed as tied to colonialism or cultural dominance, yet we embrace universal ideas like healthcare and human rights as progressive. Yang’s work suggests that art, too, has the power to bridge divides and foster empathy, breaking down barriers between cultures. Art may vary greatly across traditions, but at its core, it speaks to our shared humanity – a message as relevant as ever in our polarised times.

Haegue Yang’s Leap Year: Universal Art for a Divided World is on at the Hayward Gallery in London from October 9 2024 to January 5 2025

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The average art lover isn’t supposed to like art fairs because they’re so corporate. When you pay £9 for a sandwich and your wifi is sponsored by a big bank, you can understand the reservations. They’re also too big and crowded. Even the VIPs are left queuing to get in.

But the fair provides opportunities to see work from galleries from all over the world in London and there is plenty of good art on display. As Frieze describes itself “[it] is one of the world’s most influential contemporary art fairs, focusing only on contemporary art and living artists”. It is primarily for those in the art world, those who create, critique and those who collect, and a lot of money changes hands as the world’s galleries show the best they have. But it has also become a cultural day out.

Apart from loads of great painting and the occasional noncommercial showpiece, Frieze goes out of its way to balance the corporate with more thoughtful displays. There’s a chance to see big-name artists, international galleries and work by new artists. The “Artist-to-Artist” section returned this year, containing work by emerging talents (selected by established artists). With so much on show, Frieze can be daunting. You can easily spend a whole day at the fair, but with so much on display there is truly something for everybody.

At this year’s Frieze, international highlights included Proyectos Ultravioleta from Guatemala city, who showed miniature paintings by Rosa Elena Curruchich hung alongside larger works emblazoned with the text “me venden” (they’re selling me) by Edgar Calels. Calels also brought the smell of a forest into the booth by covering the floor with pine needles.

Jhaveri Contemporary (Mumbai, India) presented work by the Bangladeshi duo Kamruzzaman Shadhin and Gidree Bawlee. The piece Kaal (Pala) consists of seven delightful jute figures – among the most enchanting figurative sculptures I have seen recently. Joydeb Roaja’s pen drawings of people, tanks, and people with tanks on their heads are as enigmatic and disturbing as they are engaging.

Non-commercial art appeared in Jenkins Van Zyl’s Sweat Exchange at Edel Assanti (London). This video installation housed in what Van Zyl has called a sauna-cum-“sweat extraction brewery”, which features two doppelgangers, who alternate between self-care and abuse. Imagine the Pink Panther crossed with Jar Jar Binks as a drag queen and you’re nearly there.

Then there was Patrick Goddard’s silver cast bees on the floor of Seventeen Gallery, and Lawrence Lek (winner of the Frieze artist award) who has produced Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot – an interactive videogame installation about an AI created to service self-driving cars.

Most of the works were are those hung on walls. Gallery booths have a small storage area in which they are able to keep paintings and prints, (but less able to store sculptural works). Collectors also favour paintings, prints and photographs to adorn their walls (or similarly put into storage) over artists’ films or video installations.

What’s to complain about though when there is so much good painting on display?

Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh showed work by Los Angeles-based painter Hayley Barker.
Frieze/Ingleby

Highlights included Tom Anholt and Ryan Mosley at Josh Lilley Gallery (London); Carl Freedman Gallery (Margate), which showed great paintings by Ben Senior, Laura Footes and Vanessa Raw (as well as Lindsey Mendick’s ceramic sculptures) and Tanya Leighton Gallery (Berlin and LA), which had plenty of good painting on show, including works by Matthew Krishanu. Ingleby (Edinburgh) showed Andrew Cranston and Hayley Barker and Arcadia Missa (London) showed Lewis Hammond’s Schmetterling, an eerie blue interior with an unsettling blue-eyed figure, and Jesse Darling, whose Come on England (up the) takes a novel approach to wall-based work by leaning crowd-control barriers in the corner of the gallery booth.

Counter Editions (Margate) presented a Tracey Emin solo show. You’re not supposed to like Emin, since she outed herself as a Tory sympathiser. Opposite is a Billy Childish solo show at Lehmann Maupin (London, Seoul, New York), where the artist paints live while wearing a beret next to a dirty stepladder for reaching the tops of the large canvases. You’re not supposed to like Billy Childish either because he is a Stuckist (stuck in the age of Van Gogh and Edvard Munch – his only two art heroes). Funnily enough, Charles Thomson, co-founder of Stuckism, derived the name from an insult by Emin, who told Childish, her ex-lover, that his art was “stuck, stuck, stuck”. Don’t tell anybody, but the Emin and Childish works were quite good.

With an annual curated section, more solo shows and over 270 Galleries from more than 40 countries, if you love art in all its forms (and can afford it) you should experience Frieze London at least once. If you didn’t go this year, you really should spend a day there next. Despite what people say… you’re bound to find something you like.

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