When Haegue Yang was in Germany a few years ago, she became fascinated by a local hardware store, or more specifically its catalogue. She made a series of collages by cutting it up, including one in which rolls of brown packing paper are arranged in a star-like symmetrical pattern. And that’s it. The Hayward’s retrospective of this 53-year-old South Korean is full of stuff like this. It is immense, crowded and completely unrewarding. None of it adds up and none of it is moving – unless you are the kind of person who tears up over a venetian blind. “Venetian blinds are a prominent feature,” says a wall text, explaining Yang’s work. “She is particularly drawn to their tilted slats.”
In one installation, these tilted slats cover the sides of illuminated boxes. It comes as a shock when you read that this neutral-looking work is entitled 5, Rue Saint-Benoit and is meant to suggest the Paris home of the novelist Marguerite Duras where she lived as a member of the resistance in the second world war. Looking again, you see that one of the blinded crates is painted like a tricolour. Otherwise, the heavy cultural reference hangs irrelevantly in the void – and it’s not the only one.
