Located where the river Thames bends north to east, before it reaches Shakesperare’s Globe, Tate Modern and Borough Market, stands the impressive, brutalist architectural complex designed by Norman Engelback back in the swinging sixties, the heart of London’s cultural life, namely: the South Bank Center. The gray concrete interlocking blocks which include British Film Institute, The National Theatre, The Royal Festival Hall, Purcell Room, and Hayward Gallery, which presents South Korea artist’s Haegue Yang ( b. 1971) Leap Year, her solo exhibition between 9 October 2024 and 5 January 2025, comprising multisensory installations and sculptures that interlace diverse histories, cultures, and traditions.

Installation view of Haegue Yang: Leap Year, 2024. Windy Terrace Beyond Reach, 2024. Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.

Recognized as a leading artist of her generation, Haegue Yang creates innovative work that explores themes of cultural exchange, blends of modernism with folk traditions, and layers personal and political history. Her distinctive, captivating visual language encompasses a variety of media — from paper collages to theatrical performances and sculptural installations — and materials such as drying racks, light bulbs, Venetian blinds, nylon pom-poms, synthetic straw, bells, and lacquered graph paper. Straddling the line between kitsch and offbeat, her work transforms everyday objects into immersive, multisensory experiences. As Yang explains, “my artworks often have very long names with seemingly odd combinations of words that are hard even for me to memorize, whereas my exhibition titles are much simpler. This naming tradition mirrors my relationship to art-making versus exhibition-making. Art making is like weaving together a piece of complex, and therefore impossible to unweave, fabric, while exhibition making is like tailoring it into something comfortable to wear. Both acts are eager attempts towards perfection. For this survey show, I deliberately unfocused my eyes to obtain the hidden 3D vision of my own practice, which is a rare, perfect occurrence like a leap year.”

Installation view of Haegue Yang: Leap Year, 2024. Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.

This approach has developed into a unique and evolving visual language, one that blends diverse cultural influences. Leap Year features highlights from some of her most celebrated series, including Light Sculptures, Sonic Sculptures, The Intermediates, Dress Vehicles, Mesmerizing Mesh, and her Venetian blind installations. The artist’s wide-ranging observations of different aspects of society, politics, and cultural histories across the globe with her series of sculptures, installations and collages from the past three decades. The exhibition is organized into five thematic zones and features three major new commissions along with several new works, creating an immersive visual and sensory experience through installations, sculptures, collages, text, video, wallpaper, and sound. The various works presented here are meant to be experienced as a single journey, encouraging the blurring of themes and boundaries, and of the temporal and the spatial.

Installation view of Haegue Yang: Leap Year, 2024. Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.

Beyond their offbeat aesthetic, Yang’s works delve into themes of cultural and identity exchange, juxtaposing folk and craft traditions with mass-produced and organic materials. Through this imaginative fusion, she weaves social, political, and cultural histories from around the world, bridging past and present in a visually captivating way. In fact, Yang’s interest in community and engagement first emerged through the documentary form. Over time, this approach became less narrative-driven, focusing instead on sensorial experiences. Her image-based works of the early 2000s are emblematic of her empathic gaze into urban life.