Korean artist Haegue Yang presents “Liquid Votive – Tree Shade Triad” (2025), her tallest venetian blind set up so far, within the form of an inverted tree. The work is the inaugural site-specific fee for the brand new Taichung Artwork Museum in Taiwan. Courtesy of the artist, Taichung Artwork Museum and Kukje Gallery
TAICHUNG, Taiwan — Dangling within the hovering, light-bathed atrium of the brand new Taichung Artwork Museum is a 24-meter-tall “tree,” improbably hanging the wrong way up.
Timber, after all, are supposed to root themselves within the earth. However in artist Haegue Yang’s imaginative and prescient, gravity is quietly overturned.
The result’s “Liquid Votive — Tree Shade Triad,” a floating kind through which deep inexperienced venetian blinds turn out to be branches and leaves, whereas LED tubes coil round it just like the straw garlands tied round divine bushes in Korean shamanism. At night time, lights flicker and dart throughout its floor like fireflies within the forest.
Utilizing industrial supplies, Yang reimagines sacred bushes, lengthy revered as communal guardians throughout Asia, putting them in a brand new context and kind.
Haegue Yang’s “Liquid Votive — Tree Shade Triad” (2025) / Courtesy of the artist, Taichung Artwork Museum and Kukje Gallery
“Liquid Votive” is her tallest set up so far, its scale unmistakable because the inverted tree by no means leaves guests’ sight as they climb the constructing’s spiraling six-story ramp. The piece is a part of the Taichung Artwork Museum’s inaugural site-specific fee, serving as its symbolic face for the subsequent two years.
“As a result of the work is so massive, it appears to attract nearer or recede relying on the place the viewer stands. Its uppermost sections even spill past the ramp,” the 54-year-old mentioned in an interview on the museum a day earlier than its grand opening on Dec. 13.
Museums, she added, are inclined to insist that artworks stay neatly contained inside prescribed boundaries. “However just like the creeping branches of an historic tree, this one stretches outward, extending past the area it’s been given.”
The dimensions and type of “Liquid Votive” had been impressed by a area journey Yang took this 12 months to the forests of Taichung, the place she encountered the Taiwanese custom of venerating large bushes.
“What does it actually imply, bodily, for one thing to be massive?” she requested. “It may possibly really feel oppressive, even domineering. However that wasn’t what I sensed in these bushes. I used to be drawn as a substitute to a sense of openness, one thing you look as much as with readability. One thing respectable, but acquainted. And at night time, it turns into one thing mysterious and mystical.”
To her, largeness is inseparable from age, which in flip led her to consider animism, the traditional perception that spirit permeates all issues.
“A terrific waterfall, a large rock, an infinite tree — they’re huge, however they don’t really feel ‘spectacular’ in the best way trendy civilization defines spectacle. What they evoke as a substitute is respect.”
Haegue Yang’s “Liquid Votive — Tree Shade Triad” (2025) / Courtesy of the artist, Taichung Artwork Museum and Kukje Gallery
The atrium that holds Yang’s fee, with its 27-meter-high ceiling and daylight pouring in via huge expanses of glass, introduced a singular problem. Reasonably than a sealed white dice, the area is a clear quantity wrapped in an outer pores and skin of metallic mesh, open to gentle, climate and time.
“This isn’t a totally scientific, climate-controlled room,” she mentioned. “In some ways, it’s a wild area — one which makes it tough to put in ‘unusual’ works. It’s a bit just like the Turbine Corridor at Tate Trendy [in London].”
But it was exactly this problem that in the end drew her in, regardless of being invited to tackle the undertaking only a 12 months earlier than the museum was set to open.
“I used to be positively baited,” she famous with a smile. “You’re given a whole area of this scale to work with by yourself. And it’s a spot nobody has handled earlier than, as a result of it’s a brand new museum. I like taking over that position, the place how I strategy the area can assist set the tone and course for what comes subsequent.”
Making full use of the shifting gentle that floods the atrium over the course of the day, the artist conceived the work as a two-phase being that strikes between day and night time. The angle of the sunshine, its temperature, the climate — these environmental components turn out to be parameters that affect the work.
To permit guests to expertise these completely different states, “Liquid Votive” stays seen lengthy after the museum’s closing hours. Seen from the encompassing park till 10 p.m., its luminous construction drew folks taking night strolls via the park on the opening weekend.
“Liquid Votive” stays seen from the encompassing park, even when the Taichung Artwork Museum is closed. Courtesy of the artist, Taichung Artwork Museum and Kukje Gallery
Whereas the piece will retain its vertically monumental kind for the subsequent two years, Yang has already envisioned its life past the fee. The set up will be modulated and reconfigured into three separate models that may be positioned facet by facet.
“There simply aren’t that many buildings on the earth with a ceiling top of 27 meters, so from the start, I labored with the belief that this work would at some point have to reside inside a extra typical gallery,” she defined.
That foresight displays her perception that artworks should be thought of far past the length of a single exhibition.
“A piece isn’t made only for the right here and now, however with 50 and even 100 years in thoughts. I present my work internationally, however I’ve reached some extent the place getting into institutional collections issues deeply to me as nicely, so {that a} piece will be taken out repeatedly, researched and reassessed over time,” the artist mentioned. “If there are 100 exhibitions, fewer than 10 % end in acquisition.”
Such pondering inevitably results in sensible questions of how an set up may be tailored or remodeled in ways in which permit it to stay cell — and alive.
Yang already confronted these issues in 2016, when she introduced the large-scale blind set up “Lingering Nous” on the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Composed of 4 distinct lots, the work entered the museum’s assortment and was subsequently reconfigured because it traveled throughout Pompidou’s world community, together with KANAL in Brussels, the Centre Pompidou X West Bund Museum Challenge in Shanghai and the Centre Pompidou Málaga in Spain.
Making use of the shifting gentle that floods the museum’s atrium over the course of the day, Haegue Yang conceived “Liquid Votive” as a two-phase being that strikes between day and night time. Courtesy of the artist, Taichung Artwork Museum and Kukje Gallery
Regardless of her standing as probably the most in-demand artists working in the present day — a standing underscored by her common look on ArtReview’s Energy 100 listing, the annual rating of the artwork world’s most influential figures — Yang is evident about the place her consideration doesn’t lie. How her work is evaluated, she mentioned, is neither her concern nor her area.
“I deal with being a practitioner,” she mentioned. “What I do is create phenomena that may spark dialogue, virtually like brokers provocateurs for society and humanity. How that work is definitely obtained, I’m not interested by it, and I don’t take into account it my territory. If I’m criticized, I settle for it. If I’m welcomed, I settle for that, too. That’s all there’s.”
Viewers, she added, inevitably undertaking their very own frameworks onto her work and onto her as a creator. “Some folks see me as an Asian artist, others as a girl artist; some see me as Korean, others as diasporic. An artist is, by nature, a floor for projection. There are components of that picture I’ve formed myself, however more and more, it’s society that constructs it. In that sense, my very own opinion doesn’t really feel all that essential.”
In Taichung, Yang recedes as soon as extra, leaving the work to face by itself — or moderately, to hold suspended between earth and sky.
