Haegue Yang

Leap Year

★★☆☆☆

On until 5 January 2025

The only good way to encounter a Yang piece is on the last day of an art fair, where the dealer won’t mind your kid jangling the bells on her giant mobile sculptures. In the gallery, only the staff may touch the same laundry racks and light bulbs lest they find life of their own. These objects lack verve here, like in the Ikea catalogue where they belong.

The institution mindlessly reads life, culture, and even high politics into Yang’s window blind hangings, ignoring her testimony of this project’s sterility. It sadly makes far less of her early varnish and waste paintings which are the show’s only lively components. Next to them, Yang’s ‘Korean craft’ section comes off as a con and not a life’s question. The funfair is shuttered, long live the fair.


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Jasper Marsalis,  \m/’ at Emalin ★★★★☆

Jasper Marsalis

\m/'

★★★★☆

The circus is in town, its acts are the infrastructure of contentment.

Bruno Zhu, License to Live at Chisenhale ★☆☆☆☆

Bruno Zhu

License to Live

★☆☆☆☆

Faced with so little, one longs for an even emptier room.

Avery Singer, Free Fall at Hauser & Wirth ★★☆☆☆

Avery Singer

Free Fall

★★☆☆☆

This show would be better without the baggage of the artist’s personal story and even better without the Twin Towers altogether.

Future Relics at Union Pacific ★★★★☆

Future Relics

★★★★☆

“Reskilling” has the same ring in art as “reindustrialisation” does in geopolitics.

Simon Moretti et al, Hereafter at Swedenborg Society ★★★★★

Simon Moretti et al.

Hereafter

★★★★★

A Platonic hierarchy of forms rules this enigmatic exhibition.

Urs Fischer, Scratch & Sniff at Sadie Coles ★★★☆☆

Urs Fischer

Scratch & Sniff

★★★☆☆

It’s too early for a funeral, yet there’s no other reprieve in this commodity cult.

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