Contemporary artist Haegue Yang’s solo exhibition, Haegue Yang: Lost Lands and Sunken Fields, is currently on view at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas. The exhibition highlights Yang’s sculptural practice which has continually subverted modernist ideas about sculptural production. It also showcases approximately fifty works consisting of existing works as well as newly-produced small-scale sculptures, occupying both levels of the museum’s galleries and garden.

Over the past three decades, Yang has developed a prolific and hybrid body of work that folds quotidian objects and folk traditions into the canon of modern and contemporary sculpture-making. Informed by in-depth exploration into vernacular techniques, customs, and rituals, along with her continual movement through disparate cultures, Yang’s work is both an homage to and critique of the modernist project toward singular Western domination. The exhibition engages directly with dialectics of contrasts: of light and dark, aerial and grounded, buoyant and heavy, spare and dense, interior and exterior. Such is further witnessed in the exhibition’s presentation that brings the contrasts together in one space, as well as the displayed works that incubate the Mother Nature in their small bodies.

Presented in the exhibition is a new body of works that incorporates the architectural traits of the museum. Suspended from the ceiling is a group of sculptures titled Airborne Paper Creatures – Triple Synecology (2025), taking inspiration from centuries-old kite-making traditions across the Pan-Asian region. The work refers to the study of interactions between species that share a habitat and delicately and ethereally captures the dynamic actions taken by birds, marine animals and insects through materials such as hanji and marbled paper with a variety of embellishments. In the meantime, Mignon Votives (2025) form a small colony of pinecones and pebbles on the ground, intricately decorated with both organic and inorganic materials. This group of diminutive sculptures is seen as Yang’s attempt to interweave the natural horizontal landscape with small-scale sculptures. Lastly, the subterranean level of the museum showcases Cenote Observatory, an ensemble of seven sculptures produced since 2016. The works are either suspended or standing freely on casters, boasting voluminous and tentacled bodies replete with bushy, hairy, metallic, and woven surfaces, further creating an immersive environment.

Jed Morse, Interim Director and Chief Curator of the Nasher Sculpture Center, expressed his excitement to showcase Yang’s works in Dallas and comments: “Haegue Yang’s work continually provides new insights into the multivalent world in which we live, reconciling past and present. (…) [Her sculptures] highlight the centrality of objects in making meaning from our diverse well of experiences.” The exhibition runs through April 27, 2025.