Roll Cosies – Cash Register Rolls, 50 Meter, 2012
5 x thermal paper rolls, knitting yarn
Dimensions (H x W x D): each 6.2 x 6.5 x 6.5 cm
edition of 5 (+2AP)
Lot number 52
Minimum bid: 1.500,- EUR / estimated price 3.000,- to 4.000,- EUR
Haegue Yang
- Über das Werk: Under the title of Roll Cosies at the Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp, Yang now presents five cash register rolls, covered with neatly crocheted cosies. Everyday objects, mostly industrially fabricated items, often become a starting point for Yang to contemplate our immediate environment. However, the viewer’s subjective perception of it in a specific space plays an equally important role. Making a handmade cosy for such an ordinary consumer item is an unexpectedly affectionate gesture, like the tea cosies that grandmother used to make. At the same time, it is an obscure gesture: Are the Roll Cosies supposed to keep the figures warm that are yet to be burned on thermal paper? Would such figures refer simply to food supplies, or would they reflect her own artistic success? But the warmly clad rolls of paper are still unused, entirely virginal, in fact. Roll Cosies seems, instead, to deal with rather the pure, the unspoiled ‘skin’, which protects the immaculate und the innocent against the vagaries of modern everyday life – against marking, lettering, tattooing, against scratches and scrapes, against hard knocks and dents. The cosies keep the new new and the untouched untouched. Lovingly crocheted in wool, these Roll Cosies represent a protective enclosure of consumeristic products, which usually have a short and non-recyclable life, but which now maintain their unusual potentiality and become profoundly inefficient.
- Haegue Yang
- Haegue Yang (b. 1971, Seoul) lives and works between Berlin and Seoul. She serves as Vice-Rector of the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, where she also received her MFA in 1999. Spanning a vast range of media—from collage to kinetic sculpture and room-scaled installations—Yang’s work links disparate histories and traditions in her distinctive visual idiom. The artist draws on a variety of craft techniques and materials, and the cultural connotations they carry: from drying racks to venetian blinds, hanji to artificial straw. Yang’s multisensory environments activate perception beyond the visual, creating immersive experiences that treat issues such as labor, migration, and displacement from the oblique vantage of the aesthetic. Ensuring that her references remain wayward and personalized, Yang prizes fluidity over unified narratives. “Maintaining an aporia between form and content, material and subject, abstraction and history, is an act of translating the struggle of one’s life,” she has said.
mehr
A recipient of the Wolfgang Hahn Prize in 2018 and the 13th Benesse Prize at the Singapore Biennale in 2022, Yang has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at museums around the world, including: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2023), S.M.A.K. – Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent (2023); Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2023); SMK – National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2022), MMCA, Seoul (2020); Tate St Ives (2020); MoMA – The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2018); Centre George Pompidou, Paris (2016); Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2012); and the Korean Pavilion of the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009).
