Haegue Yang's Strange Attractors explore chaos in the natural world

Your work is often inspired by context. How have visits to Cornwall in the UK influenced your recent work?

Haegue Yang: The exhibition at Tate St Ives [set to reopen after the national COVID-19 lockdown] brings together existing works with new pieces inspired by my visits to Cornwall in 2018-19. I felt so exposed to nature and the local cultural and sacred landscapes. Sentimental, melancholic, even romantic feelings overwhelmed me – tough and rough, sometimes dangerous, as well as mystical. In urban areas, I don’t often feel so emotionally challenged.

Ideas of water recur throughout the exhibition, strongly inspired by the landscape, mood, traditions, community and livelihoods of St Ives, but also a reminder of coastal communities and coastlines, elsewhere. In the new wallpaper piece, Non-Linear and Non-Periodic Dynamics, and in the new Trustworthies collage works, are notions of coastal landscapes, oceans, fog, floods, rain, waterfalls, storms and even dams, taps and buckets.

Mundus Cushion –Yielding X (2020) is a furniture sculpture inspired by St Senara’s Church in nearby Zennor and draws on the community’s craft skills evident in its church pews and kneeler cushions. This piece, comprising eight cushions on a wooden modular stand, borrows some of the motifs, techniques and shapes from St Senara’s, such as the labour-intensive cross stitching technique used on the pew cushions and the design of a sitting and kneeling bench. The piece connects the hopes and anxieties found in Cornwall and at sacred sites across different eras and locations.

What does the title ‘Strange Attractors’ refer to?

The exhibition borrows its title from the scientific study of ‘strange attractors’ – the structures towards which chaotic systems tend to evolve. It explores the concept of chaos in the natural world, how it resists human prediction and classification, and humankind’s universal venture to live within chaos and unpredictability.

You are known for bringing together a diverse range of materials to create immersive environments and artworks. What dictates your choice of materials?

I believe that every encounter, whether it’s with a person or a material, is fundamentally a mixture of accident and destiny, although I do unconsciously look for materials that carry meanings of domesticity, our world, or some quality relevant to our lives.

The Intermediates borrow plant-working materials, techniques and customs from multiple cultures. Straw, palm or banana leaves and other seasonal agricultural leftovers are universal materials and have been used across civilisations, centuries and continents. The techniques, processes and patterns of straw-work can be inherited, communal or shared, while also remaining distinct to a community or culture. In earlier iterations of the series, begun in 2015, I employed synthetic products that emulate natural straw. Later works diverted from this imitation of the ‘real’ material, to incorporate synthetic, cheap and industrial materials such as shiny black and white plastic cords. This tendency to drift away from one’s own logic, or unlearn a self-established rule, is characteristic of my work.

You often use labour-intensive, craft-based processes in creating your artworks. What is the significance of craft and skilled hand-making to you?

I care less about the amount of labour, and more about the time taken. The idea of taking one’s time is interesting to me, questioning if one is truly being productive or squandering these moments away. Being slow could be a form of resistance against the idea of efficiency in a neoliberal society.

Labour is often associated with hard physical work, while the idea of ‘digital’ sounds as if it requires less work, which is often untrue. My digitally conceived works, such as my wallpaper piece, require an incredible amount of skilled labour: to identify and collect images; prepare, cut, and carefully paste; compose, scale; and finally to print and install.

How do you incorporate craft-based processes in your practice?

Usually, I learn a craft-based technique first and then teach this to the rest of the studio, so we can collectively produce the works. If I know that the technique will be important, I invite an artisan to give a workshop to the studio so that we learn together. Even after the initial learning phase is over, one needs a long period of time, or a mastering period, to practise. The actual period of invention and innovation comes after this.

Some of my studio staff are better than me at many of the techniques I use in my work. These days my role as the artist in the studio is to determine the steps we need to develop skills. So I need to come up with a project to test new elements, materials, methods or ideas, which will lead us to the next level, to combine different materials and techniques together.

Are there specific crafts that inspire and influence you?

I am interested in all types of weaving, because it is fascinating for me to weave thin materials to create a surface, which later can be developed into a three-dimensional space. Weaving is similar to origami – by simply folding a sheet of paper, one can create a three dimensional space. To learn about straw weaving, I invited an artisan from a distant southern province in Korea. They visited us in Seoul several times, and we learned straw weaving together in the garden of my home in Seoul, sitting on the ground in a circle. Later, we developed our own way of using the traditional straw weaving techniques by combining non-traditional methods to create larger free-standing sculptures using fake straw.

I also wanted to learn macramé for a long time. After I finally learnt it during my residency in Glasgow, I went on to teach it to several people at my Seoul and Berlin studios.

Recently, for the first time, I produced a work without first learning the technique on my own. This was for a new series of rattan sculptures, begun during research into local craftsmanship and materiality in the Philippines. I visited a fantastic rattan workshop in Manila owned by a family who are genuinely invested in art and craftsmanship. I then started studying their products and techniques and realised the necessity to archive their weaving patterns. I had plans to return to Manila to learn more, but due to the pandemic, the trip was cancelled. I hope to return in the future to deepen my experience and understanding of rattan work and generate new sculptures with the artisans there.

Strange Attractors is due to run until 3 May 2021 at Tate St Ives, but is currently closed due to the national COVID-19 lockdown.