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:

things fall apart; the centre cannot hold at Tabula Rasa ★★★★☆

Elli Antoniou, Ali Glover, Richard Dean Hughes

things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

★★★★☆

These works could bear witness to the birth of a star or the heat death of the universe. The curators don’t know which.

Botond Keresztesi, NPC (No-one Paints Chrysopoeia) at Seventeen ★★★☆☆

Botond Keresztesi

NPC (No-one Paints Chrysopoeia)

★★★☆☆

There is no “too much” in this fantasy meme game.

Entangled Pasts at The Royal Academy ★★☆☆☆

Entangled Pasts, 1768–now

★★☆☆☆

Who could have thought that these mantras would turn into rote?

Ithaca at Herald St ★★★★☆

Christopher Aque, Alekos Fassianos, Luigi Ghirri, Jessie Stevenson, George Tourkovasilis

Ithaca

★★★★☆

This show drips with affectation that wouldn’t survive a minute tomorrow.

Gina Fischli, Love Love Love at Soft Opening ★★★★☆

Gina Fischli

Love Love Love

★★★★☆

What good it is to be best in show when the competition is lame, crooked, or outright fake?

Deimantas Narkevičus, The Fifer at Maureen Paley ★★☆☆☆

Deimantas Narkevičus

The Fifer

★★☆☆☆

In the age of the decolonial, this is as quaint as it is outmoded

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