Shadow figures

It's OK to pound on the drum kit tucked at the back of Haegue Yang's inscrutable installation at Walker Art Center through Feb. 28. No sign authorizes the activity, but Yang and curator Doryun Chong said recently that the drums were there to be played. Not only that, but doing so will activate the lights that play across the Venetian blinds and mirrors dangling in the room. A really hot drummer could probably send vibes echoing down from the seventh-floor gallery through the whole Walker.

Which might be a good thing for Yang's otherwise mystifying show. Inexplicably subtitled "Integrity of the Insider," it is filled with often obscure allusions to avant-gardists (Belgian conceptualist Marcel Broodthaers, French novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras) and oddly disconnected vignettes (geometrically shaped white paintings; a slide show of Korean real estate ads; black-and-white photos of "a clothes-drying rack doing a calisthenic exercise," as the Walker described it).

Walker has been something of a champion of the Korean-born artist, whose name is pronounced HEG-you Yang, since an earlier version of her Venetian-blind installation was included in a 2007 show. Last year the Minneapolis institution co-produced her drum-kit-and-Venetian-blind installation, called "Yearning Melancholy Red," in Los Angeles. The current show, also organized by the Walker, is her first solo museum exhibition in the United States. It follows closely her appearance at this year's Venice Biennale, at which she was the first woman to represent Korea. Yang is also spending two months at the Walker this fall doing seminars, workshops and other events with museum staff members and visitors in preparation for programs she'll present in February.

Light and shadows

Installed in a single gallery, "Integrity" begins with six small white paintings on three-dimensional, wedge-shaped canvases. Yang is fascinated by geometry and standardized shapes, Chong said, noting that the paintings were the size of typical European writing paper, which tends to be longer and narrower than its American counterpart. Light from a gallery window cast nice shadows over the canvases, extending their geometric nuances.

Next comes a short documentary film in which Broodthaers, sitting in a garden, writes a letter that subsequently dissolves in rain. Then there's the slide show of Korean real estate ads for utopian-looking apartment towers with the promotional copy inked out. And the mildly amusing black-and-white photos of the clothes-drying rack in various configurations that mimic stretches and jumping jacks. Plus some spray-painted images of geometric shapes -- pentagons, squares, triangles -- that suggest X-rays of origami objects.

Then it's into the main installation, a large room from whose ceiling dangle Venetian blinds and mirrors illuminated by theatrical lights that cast a red glow and deep, linear shadows. The blinds simultaneously reveal and conceal, mask parts of the room and lend a sense of voyeurism to the experience. You may feel yourself to be spying or spied upon. The combination of reflections and shadows can be baffling and a bit mysterious. Drumming could alter the scene even more, perhaps heightening its edgy, nightclub quality. Or not.

What to make of all this? Yang has described her work as a kind of nonlinear narrative in which light, shadow and abstract forms are poetic representations of some interior monologue, emotional state, memory or yearning. Like Duras, a rootless French woman haunted by her colonial childhood in what is now Vietnam, Yang is a culturally displaced artist who was born in Seoul, educated in South Korea and Germany, exhibits everywhere (London, Frankfurt, Pittsburgh, Bilbao, Sao Paulo) and seems -- on the basis of this show, at least -- completely detached from everything but the shadows in her mind.

For all its sophisticated allusions and theatrical effects, "Integrity" feels conceptually thin, intellectually underdeveloped and emotionally void. The work is simultaneously dashing everywhere and going nowhere. Despite the theorizing and name-dropping, Yang doesn't appear to have figured out what she wants or needs to say. Her many successes to date suggest that she burns with passionate intensity. But why?

Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431