Haegue Yang. Series of Vulnerable Arrangements, Version Utrecht.

A room in Utrecht, 2006

In 2006 Haegue Yang became the first artist in the research residency programme at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, an art centre in Utrecht in the Netherlands. The residency led to an exhibition, Haegue Yang Unevenly.

It showed three of her video essays: Unfolding Places and Restrained Courage from 2004, Wasting Negative Places from 2006. Alongside them stood a new installation, Series of Vulnerable Arrangements. The version made for BAK carried the city's name: Version Utrecht.

There were no statues and no paintings. The installation was made of ordinary technical devices: heaters, a humidifier, electric fans, scent atomisers. And Venetian blinds, the office kind that tilt to let light in or shut it out.

By most accounts, this was the first time Yang used blinds in her work. They later became one of her most recognisable materials. In Utrecht, though, they were only one part of a larger system: a system for handling air. The series went on to other versions, such as Voice and Wind, each rebuilt for a different place.

Devices at work instead of objects on show

A gallery usually tries to be neutral. White walls, even light, stable temperature. The work is meant to rise from a background of nothing. But that background is not nothing. It is produced by air conditioning, by lamps, by humidity rules that keep paintings from decaying.

Yang reverses the order. She brings the devices that make the room's climate into the middle. A heater warms one corner. A fan pushes air one way. A humidifier adds moisture. An atomiser releases a scent into the current.

Visitors do not stand in front of the work. They stand inside it. Moving from corner to corner, the body registers small changes: warmth on a cheek, a little damp, a smell that passes and is gone. Each change belongs to the work, and none of it holds still for a photograph.

The blinds do one more thing. They divide the space without closing it. Light slips through the slats. So does air. So does smell. The room is partitioned yet connected, like a body with many chambers and one breath.

Why vulnerable

The title uses the word vulnerable. It can be read in several ways.

First, the objects. These arrangements do not last. Cut the power and the scent stops spreading, the fans stop, the warmth fades. Nothing is fixed. The work exists only while the machines run and someone walks through to feel it.

Second, the viewer. Eyes can choose not to look. Skin and nose find it harder to choose. In Yang's room, visitors are touched by heat, damp and smell whether they want it or not. The contact is intimate and not entirely comfortable.

Third, the institution. Yang shows that the conditions for seeing art, the supposedly neutral climate of a museum, are an arrangement someone decided on. Anything arranged can be arranged differently.

Back at the Hayward, almost twenty years on

In 2024 Version Utrecht was included in Haegue Yang: Leap Year, her large survey at the Hayward Gallery in London, which ran until 5 January 2025, curated by Yung Ma.

In a wide programme of woven straw figures, collages of hanji paper, and sculptures on castors hung with bells and set in motion by performers each week, the 2006 piece sat in the final rooms. It looks drier and more technical than what comes before.

Placed at the end, it works like a footnote to the whole show. Every object before it stood in air that had been adjusted. In the last rooms, Yang lets that air show itself. Visitors leave with a small question about the room they just crossed: why it was warm, what it smelled of, and who decided that.