HAEGUE YANG - SPECIAL EDITION BAG

Special edition bags by Haegue Yang, created from her work Incantations - Entwinement, Endurance and Extinction (2022). 80 unique pieces.

Incantations - Entwinement, Endurance and Extinction was originally conceived as a wallpaper, which she has now printed on fabric, a medium that, just as wallpaper, challenges conventional perceptions of space and form.

The work is inspired by Jeremy Narby’s influential text The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge (1998), which was based on two years of fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon. In this book, Narby inferred that connections exist between the shamanic practice of ingesting Ayahuasca (a psychoactive brew) and molecular biology. 

Referencing Narby’s speculations on the transmission of knowledge at the molecular level, Yang offers a view to the sky through the forest with colorful arcs and gradated masses relating to photosynthesis traversing the composition, while her own creations based on paper props used in Korean shamanism become enmeshed in the dense forest, in concert with ascending serpents. That scenario bleeds into a giant image of “the blob”—a unicellular slime mold with an insatiable appetite that challenges our understanding of intelligent life through its adaptive learning and communication skills. Hidden in this complex composition of metallic bells and floating double helixes are details made with the encoded repeating pattern of “magic eyes”. For Yang, these mysterious patterns symbolize the “defocalizing” act needed to challenge scientific rationalism.