For its third participation at Liste, Basel, sissi club is pleased to present Birthmarks, a new project by HaYoung. The exhibition features new glass sculptures produced at CIRVA1 during a residency that began in 2024, alongside new works on paper.
The sculptures of the Bellybutton series stem from the ongoing project Ph-X², inspired both by the mythology of glass as a substance in perpetual fusion, and by the principles of quantum physics. Ph-X explores ways of existing in the interstices of binary systems — between solid and liquid, between 0 and 1.
The series takes its title from the navel as the body’s first mark. Each work appears as an organism in formation: a loop folded back on itself, a fibrous scar where interior and exterior become porous.
Color and curve answer each other to embody a shared movement — a body in the process of dissolving or reforming. The care given to shades is central to the entire series, playing on tensions between opacity and transparency, and on the variations produced by gradients. For example, Bellybutton 001 echoes Korean celadon, the emblematic glaze of the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392), whose soft green verging on grey-blue evokes jade.
Made with dry pastels, oil, and charcoal on grey paper and presented in custom-made shadow boxes, the works on paper in the Birthmarks series use color as their primary medium: sometimes as a color field with sharp breaks, sometimes as a gradient, echoing the sculptures.
HaYoung composes a succession of full and empty bodies, caught between the underworld and the supraworld, between what germinates beneath the earth and what rises beyond the sky. Within these drawings, several elements stand out: the cardinal axes, which structure the compositions by forming a matrix-body; the cordyceps³, a parasite generating bugs and unpredictable behaviors, disrupting systems of direction, control and belief; and the butterflies, taxidermic metaphors fixed under glass.
These presences shape a space that is both primordial and terminal — bodies in birth and bodies in death, caught in the same cycle. The exhibition proposes to link the act of being born to the act of shaping, the bodily mark to questions of identity.
¹ The Centre international de recherche sur le verre et les arts plastiques (CIRVA), founded in Marseille in 1983, invites artists and designers to work with glass in complete freedom. Its collection brings together works by Giuseppe Penone, Bob Wilson, Jana Sterbak, among others.
² Ph-X is a sculpture, performance, sound and film project by HaYoung, supported by the Fondation des Artistes.
³ Cordyceps is a parasitic fungus that grows its fruiting body on its host insect.