The Brooklyn Rail

Spam cans, venetian blinds, space heaters, scent diffusers: the materials in Haegue Yang’s oeuvre have long exposed audiences to materials which wink at the domestic and natural world and inundate the senses. Yang’s instinct to command a space can often be at odds with the bureaucracy and codes of institutions—some artistic explorations have yet to be satisfied for the sculptor: “I want to have an open flame at the museum. When can I do it?” Yang wants to be unfettered in space. In their new exhibition Lost Lands and Sunken Fields at Nasher Sculpture Center, this desire seems close to realization, where five bodies of work cover ten thousand square feet of the museum, taking over galleries on two floors, hanging from the ceilings, and sprawling across an outdoor fountain.

Yang’s works at the Nasher are arranged so that space itself is invoked. In the street level gallery, which runs the length of the museum and is flanked by floor-to-ceiling windows, elements of Yang’s “Mignon Votives” series (2025) sit among patches of moss. In this vast space, inches-tall stone stacks and pinecone sculptures require our eyes to drift low, our bodies to crouch. A recording of waves crashing on Bogil Island at the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula plays within the gallery. The scale of these sculptures could easily suggest abandoned objects, of clutter or litter disrupting what was once tidy or natural. But Yang’s penchant for imbuing her works with a sense of folklore and craft, perhaps even a warped silliness, brings an animate presence to the works. Indigo corkscrew hazel twists out from the pinecone in Mignon Votive – Electrifying Seedpod #7 and mushrooms suffocate their pinecone host in Mignon Votive – Mushrooming Seedpod #5; Mignon Votive – Nacre Flapper Seedpod #11 wears a seashell wig with locks of blonde hair framing its pinecone face. Among her “Mignon Votives – Pebble Parades” (2025), Yang has layered international currency. All are artist-made replications of real banknotes featuring fauna. Well, with the exception of one bill, a Chinese yuan featuring panda bears, which Yang admits to initially mistaking for authentic currency. The artist is at peace with the imposter yuan.

In the Nasher’s subterranean gallery, labeled “Cenote Observatory” (cenote meaning “sunken land”), light and square footage shrink; within this closed-off room Yang’s monstrous “Umbra Creatures by Rockhole” (2017–18), “Sonic Sculptures” (2013–), and “The Intermediates” (2015–) fester. Six-, seven-, eight-foot sculptures made of artificial straw, stainless steel, and twine fill the gallery tightly and erratically like objects in an overloaded antique shop. Viewers are admitted in small groups and inch past each other or pause for oncoming patron traffic as they weave their way between woven creatures, reliefs constructed of doorknobs and turbine vents, and so many bells strung in hanging columns, racks, and as otherworldly creatures. The bells make no sound. Their stillness haunts. In the back corner of the gallery is a mural depicting a portal of sorts, beckoning the viewer into a great beyond and echoing what lingers within the space. This is a “shadow” world derived from the objects of our own.

Yang wields what is familiar throughout Lost Lands and Sunken Fields and warps this into an alternative universe of things. We are then forced to confront the randomness of our own relationship with the object, left to wonder why a certain formation of materials reads as right and a reformation of them can leave us unsettled. Yang is a master of materials, not in that she takes them seriously, but rather that she takes them playfully. She is unprescribed, and at Nasher Yang’s materials are in conversation with not only the surroundings—which feel like they contract and expand in accordance with the size of her sculptures—but also with sound and light. Yang puts factors at odds with each other throughout the exhibition while allowing for balance and connection. On the street level, natural light floods the gallery and its demure figures; below, in “Cenote Observatory,” the space is dim, lit largely by one of Yang’s sculpture’s Non-Indépliable, nue – Strive and Stake Orange (2018), which is a tangle of electrical cords and fluorescent light bulbs. Outside, in Nasher’s garden, Six-Legged Carbonous Epiphyte Imoogi (2025) wraps its twiney tendrils among trees and along a stone wall at the edge of a fountain. The sounds here are an inverse of those within; Imoogi is scored by its neighboring fountain, an organic sound from a man-made water source. The internal gallery’s recording of Bogil Island emanates in the back of the mind.

Despite its playfulness and wonky symmetry, there was a certain grief in Lost Lands and Sunken Fields. Perhaps we sense the absence of the objects’ familiar forms from our known world and the meanings we imprint upon them—a mourning comes with their reinvention. Yang is forthcoming about her inspiration for “Airborne Paper Creatures – Triple Synecology” (2025), her recent series of paper and bamboo kites. These “Paper Creatures,” in opposition to a kite’s upward trajectory, hang from Nasher’s central entrance gallery, resting between the security of their chains and the pull of gravity. These works are inspired by Pakistan’s kite-fighting tradition, which has been banned in the Punjab province since 2007: eleven bystanders died during competitions that year, cut by metal and glass-coated wires. However, the loss of the practice is palpably felt by those in Pakistan connected with the tradition. In other sections of Lost Lands and Sunken Fields, the ghost is less specific: the hauntings are the tokens we leave behind when communing with nature. They are the demands and craftwork of domestic life, and how objects are not simply material. They define our spaces. They define us. Yang may not yet have fulfilled her desire to sculpt with an open flame, but Lost Lands and Sunken Fields takes up the oxygen in Nasher all the same.