Oscillations of Belonging and Estrangement: Yang Hague’s Diasporic Art

This paper examines the artistic trajectory of Korean-born, internationally active artist Yang Haegue (b. 1971), arguing that her seminal installations from the 2000s destabilize fixed notions of identity by probing the boundaries of gender, nationality, and diaspora through the lens of a nomadic artist. Scholarship on Korean women artists has often relied on essentialist frameworks—interpreting their practices primarily through categories of femininity or national origin—yet Yang complicates such readings by presenting identity as contingent, shifting, and shaped by dislocation and global circulation. Her installations conceptualize identity not as immutable essence but as a transforming process through estrangement, memory, and ambivalence. By reconfiguring industrial objects and everyday materials into immersive environments, Yang produces reflections on belonging and loss that mirror the precariousness of diasporic existence. The recurring motif of Venetian blinds, for instance, evokes both Korean traditions and Western modernist aesthetics while conjuring ideas of concealment and permeability, illustrating how cultural memory is reinterpreted and refracted across diverse contexts. Yang’s career underscores her position as a transnational nomad: she resists confinement to labels such as “Korean” or “female,” even as her work remains deeply layered with those identities. In doing so, she challenges the limitations of identity-based interpretations of Korean women artists and reframes the place of Korean contemporary art within broader global narratives. Ultimately, this study illuminates how Yang’s oeuvre expands discourse on diasporic and gendered subjectivities in contemporary art history, articulating them as dynamic negotiations rather than fixed categories.