Tate St Ives, November 2020

Strange Attractors by Haegue Yang is the UK’s largest exhibition to date by the celebrated South Korean artist. 

Yang is renowned for creating immersive environments from a diverse range of materials. Her sculptures and installations often use industrially made objects, interwoven with labour-intensive and craft-based processes. These processes reflect pagan cultures and their deep connection with various seasonal rituals in relation to natural phenomena.

The exhibition’s title – Strange Attractors – is a concept taken from mathematics and relates to complex patterns of behaviour in chaotic natural systems. Taking this theory as a starting point, Yang’s exhibition creates an environment in which uncanny and seemingly disparate ideas, cultures, relations and time periods coexist.

For the first time at Tate St Ives, the exhibition is staged across both the award-winning top-lit gallery in the new building and the spectacular sea-facing gallery in the original building. Yang transformed these two spaces into an open-ended exploration of geometry, abstraction and the aftermath of modernism.

Two layers the Zulu textile by Giulio Ridolfo covers the entire length of the gallery's curved glass front, facing the sea. Gently moving with ventilated air, the fabric’s shimmering colour overlaps with the hue of the ocean beyond, while its moiré effect will cast a blue-green light over a group of ethereal drying rack sculptures, Non-Indépliables, nues.

Photo credits:
Haegue Yang exhibition, Tate St Ives, Photo © Tate Photography.

Opening:
24 October 2020 – 26 September 2021

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Sunday 10.00–16.20