Bonner Kunstverein is pleased to present Peter Mertes Scholarship recipient Mira M. Yang's solo exhibition He that plays the king shall be welcome.
Mira M. Yang’s artistic practice is shaped by an engagement with collective memory and processes of subject formation in the context of transcultural belonging and diasporic experience. Of particular interest to them are the breaks, gaps, and shifts between event and narrative, experience and memory, that they often place in relation to historical contexts in Korean and German history. Through site-specific installations, kinetic sculpture, film, and performance, M. Yang creates stage-like spaces that explore social and political processes of identity construction and historiography.
At the Bonner Kunstverein, M. Yang presents recent and newly created kinetic assemblages whose motorized elements react to the presence of the visitor and bring body and object into a reciprocal, moving relationship. They are part of a body of research into the cultural and national legacy of visual and performative strategies of ideological systems. The assemblages shown here combine Trabant car parts with props and costume elements from the Korean Sangmo hat dance, a performative art form in which paper ribbons and feathers attached to the Sangmo hat trace hypnotic patterns in the air through movement and circling of the head. The dance is part of the repertoire of Korean Namsadang, traveling troupes of mainly male performers. They refer to a Korean folk tradition of music, dance, games, and ritual dating back to the Joseon period, whose history is marked by cultural marginalization and ideological co-optation into the 20th century: from suppression during Japanese colonial rule to its revival and renaissance as a symbol of resistance against Park Chung Hee’s military dictatorship. To this day, the lived reality of a subversive approach to gender and sexuality among Namsadang groups has been largely ignored in historiography.
In M. Yang’s works, these elements simultaneously evoke references to the dancer Choi Seung Hee— one of the first artists from colonial Korea to perform on international stages, who interwove Western and Korean dance traditions—as well as to the photographic and filmic works of Chris Marker, who documented her work in the context of socialist North Korea for a Western audience. The use of Trabant parts also links them to the history of the GDR and its ideological ambivalence between an economy of scarcity and the promise of social welfare. Out of this interplay, overlays of time, movement, and meaning emerge, in which cultural forms, political ideologies, and bodily practices become newly legible.
Mira M. Yang (b. 1993, Frankfurt) graduated in 2021 from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf as a Meisterschüler*in of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. Since then, their work has been shown at the Musée de L’Art et de l’Histoire, Geneva (2025); Musée Juif de Belgique, Brussels (2025); K20, Düsseldorf (2024); Klosterruine Berlin (2024); IMAI Foundation, Düsseldorf (2024); KIT, Düsseldorf (2024); 15th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2024); Bauhaus University Gallery, Weimar (2024); Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2023); Frac île-de-France, Paris (2023); Brücke Museum, Berlin (2022); de Appel, Amsterdam (2022); Kunstverein Bielefeld (2022); Lantz’scher Skulpturenpark, Düsseldorf (2021); Dortmunder Kunstverein (2021); and Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2019), among others. This year, they have solo exhibitions at the Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris, and Kunsthalle Friart, Fribourg, and are part of the Manifesta 16 Ruhr (2026). They live and work in Düsseldorf and Paris.
With thanks to the Peter Mertes Weinkellerei for their generous support.
