Over the past three decades, Haegue Yang has developed a prolific and hybrid body of work that reconciles and juxtaposes folk traditions with the canon of modern and contemporary sculpture-making. Informed by in-depth exploration into vernacular techniques and related customs and rituals, and her continual movement through and within disparate cultures, Yang’s work is both homage to multiple modernities and critique of the singular Western modernist project.  

For her exhibition at the Nasher, Yang explores a series of contrasts in response to the building’s architecture: light and dark, aerial and grounded, buoyant and heavy, sparse and dense. Entering the Nasher’s light-filled, street-level galleries, visitors will be greeted by a group of sculptures suspended from the ceiling. On view for the first time, Yang’s Airborne Paper Creatures – Triple Synecology (2025) comprise hanji (Korean mulberry paper), birch plywood, fabric ornaments, and metallic bells. These new works reflect the natural world, referencing the often abstracted forms of fauna such as birds, insects, and aquatic animals in centuries-old kite-making traditions that flourished throughout Asia. As installed in this transitional space of the building—just beyond the entrance and admissions desks and ahead of the threshold to the garden—Airborne Paper Creatures call attention to the felt and heard environment: airflow and the sound of the bells on the kites that is prompted by the continual movement taking place just beneath them.  

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