Haegue Yang: Quasi-Heartland
September 5, 2025 – February 8, 2026
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, USA
Installation view of Quasi-Heartland, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, USA, 2025
Photo: Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Izaiah Johnson, Tyler Small
Activation of Mound Vehicles, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, USA, 2025
Video: Foveal Media
Press Release (ENG)
Quasi-Heartland is a solo exhibition by internationally renowned artist Haegue Yang.
Based in both Seoul and Berlin since the mid-1990s, Yang is known for her versatile
material languages. Her oeuvre ranges from room-scaled installations and performative
sculptures to paper collages and staged performances, as well as her juxtaposition of
sensory elements and inclusion of ready-mades right next to craft. In this way, her works
escape conventional categorization based on media. While a major new commission,
Mound Vehicles, takes center stage in Quasi-Heartland, a selection of sculptures and
installations showcase a broad picture of Yang’s adventurous practice over the last three
decades.
Through her multi-faceted installations, Yang dissociates everyday objects and
materials—like venetian blinds, metal bells, artificial straw, and plastic twine—from
their traditional, mundane roles to recast them in multi-component sculptures or sensory
experiences. She uses scent, sound, light, and tactility to communicate ideas in a
primordial way. Yang engages the disciplines of art history, political biography, and folk
culture to reimagine recurrent themes of quasi-migration such as artistic exile,
postcolonial diasporas, and social mobility.
Across the Museum’s lobby and galleries, Quasi-Heartland puts forth a dialectic of
contrasts—aerial and grounded, organic and manmade, ancient and modern, minimalist
and figurative—while simultaneously embracing a sense of deliberate in-betweenness
implied by the word ‘quasi’ in the exhibition title. In the lobby, ominous, serpentine
sculptures descend or ascend freely from the ceiling, while their human-scaled
freestanding counterparts are contained in the fenced-in front gallery. In the neighboring
main space, a new sculpture addressing the mounds of Cahokia, Mound Vehicles, grounds
visitors, with kite-like paper-birchwood creatures flying overhead. Throughout the
exhibition, Yang’s work reminds visitors of the dynamic ways in which things coexist.
Haegue Yang: Quasi-Heartland is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Misa Jeffereis,
Associate Curator, with support from Grace Early, Exhibitions Assistant.
This exhibition is generously supported in part by Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg, Ann R. Ruwitch and John Fox Arnold,
Jeanne C. and Rex A. Sinquefield, and the Whitaker Foundation. Mound Vehicles is commissioned with support by the
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Kukje Art & Culture Foundation, and Choi Jeong Yoon.
Exhibited works
Airborne Paper Creatures, 2025
Mound Vehicles, 2025
Sonic Rampant Obscure Turbine Vents, Double Decker – Brass Green, 2017
The Intermediate – Hairy Tele Digi-Big-Bang Fanned Out, 2017
The Intermediate – Head Carrying Woman, 2017
The Intermediate – Tinted Asymmetric UHHHHH Creature W, 2017
The Intermediate – Tinted Bushy Bald-headed Bumpy Walks, 2017
The Intermediate – Tinted Multi-Tentacled Serpent, 2017
The Intermediate – Tinted UHHHHH Creature Inverted V, 2017
Umbra Creatures by Rockhole, 2017-2018