HAEGUE YANG

Early Years

Haegue Yang was born in Seoul in 1971. Her parents were activists and writers working against South Korea’s military government and the sociopolitical upheavals that accompanied her childhood have influenced her artistic practice, which considers movement and multiple cultures. She attended Seoul High School of Art, Music and Dance, then studied sculpture at Seoul National University, graduating in 1994. Moving to Frankfurt, she studied at the Städelschule Art Academy, which included a year at The Cooper Union in New York City. She graduated in 1999.

Haegue Yang: Artworks

Speaking to Ocula in 2014, Haegue Yang said: “...an artistic practice should be something actual; something to experience, not necessarily to understand; and it should rather resist the conventional idea of possessing a common thread or summary in the sense of an understandable message.”

Haegue Yang’s artistic language is at once personal and universal, blending visual abstraction with sensory elements including sound, light and touch. She considers the role materials play in history and society, and frequently returns to themes of migration, social mobility and post-colonial diasporas. Working across sculpture, theatre, installation and collage, she uses everyday objects including Venetian blinds, radiators, household appliances and drying racks alongside traditional and culturally significant mediums including straw and small bells.

• Yang began working with Venetian blinds in 2006 and the material has become a key element in her practice. At the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, the artist represented South Korea with the exhibition Condensation, which explored the hidden spaces where development can occur. Series of Vulnerable Arrangements—Voice and Wind saw Yang create a system of blinds flooded with natural light, creating shadows suggesting experiences and places that weren’t physically present.
• 2009’s Sailim (a title that references Salim, the Korean word for home-making) is a life-sized replica of Yang’s kitchen in her old Berlin apartment. It included the radiator and the boiler, but also smells of food (coffee, bread) and digestion. .
• At the Taichung Art Museum—within the “Museumbrary”, which opened in December 2025—Haegue Yang was commissioned to create Liquid Votive—Tree Shade Triad (2025), a “cosmic tree” suspended from the ceiling of the museum lobby. The work, taking inspiration from Korean traditions around the sacredness of trees, inverted the traditional idea of a tree growing from the ground and hung three cascading Venetian-blind structures from the ceiling of the 27-metre-high space. Light and shadow throughout the days and seasons is transformed by the artwork. “It’s a rare platform where artworks can appear vividly after dark,” Yang said at the time.

Haegue Yang: Select Awards

• 13th Benesse Prize, Singapore (2022)
• The Republic of Korea Cultural and Arts Award, Visual Arts Sector (2018)
• Wolfgang Hahn Prize, Cologne (2018)
• Cremer Prize, Münster (2008)
• Bâloise Art Prize, Hamburg (2007)

Haegue Yang: Select Exhibitions

Select Solo Exhibitions

• Haegue Yang: Through, Dia Beacon, New York (2026)
• Haegue Yang: Star-Crossed Rendezvous, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles (2026)
• Lost Lands and Sunken Fields, Nasher Sculpture Centre, Dallas (2025)
• Arcane Abstractions, kurimanzutto, Mexico City (2025)
• Mesmerising Mesh—Paper Leap and Sonic Germination, dépendance, Brussels (2024)
• Haegue Yang: Flat Works 2004—24, The Arts Club of Chicago (2024)
• Haegue Yang: Leap Year, Hayward Gallery, London (2024) (and touring)
• Haegue Yang: Changing From From To From, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2023)
• Mesmerising Mesh—Paper Leap and Sonic Guard, Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin (2022) (and touring)
• Haegue Yang: Handles, MoMA, New York City (2019)
• An Opaque Wind Park in Six Folds, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto (2016)
• The Tanks: Art in Action, Tate Modern, London (2012)
• Condensation, South Korean Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale (2009)
• Foxed in the Forest, dépendance, Brussels (2007)
• Cremer-Preis, Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte (LWL), Münster (2005)
• Air and Water, Dresdner Bank, Frankfurt (2002)
• Hamburgefonstiv, 1822—Forum, Frankfurt (1999)
• rraum, Frankfurt (1995)

Select Group Exhibitions

• Heredium Series: Tracing the Unfinished, Heredium, Daejeon (2026)
• Does the flower hear the bee?, 15th Shanghai Biennale (2025)
• Resonant Forms, The Hepworth Wakefield (2025)
• Attitude of Coexistence: Non-humans in East Asian Art, Hood Museum of Art, Hanover (2024)
• Performa Biennale 2023, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum/Peter B Lewis Theatre, New York City (2023)
• Planet B. Climate change and the new sublime, Palazzo Bollani, Venice (2022)
• Found Space, M+, Hong Kong (2021)
• Pine’s Eye, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (2020)
• Hidden Beauty, Kunsthalle Nürnberg (2019)
• Lesson, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon (2017)
• The Great Acceleration, Taipei Biennial (2014)
• The Grand Domestic Revolution—User’s Manual, Casco—Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht (2011)
• From the Gathering, Helen Pitt Gallery, Vancouver (2009)
• Something Mr C can’t have, Kiaf, Seoul (2007)
• 5th Gwangju Biennale (2004)
• We’re not here to give you pleasure, rraum 02, Frankfurt (2001) (and touring)
• Where I Am, Lisbon World Exposition, Galeria Municipal da Mitra, Lisbon (1998)

Further Reading

• Haegue Yang’s website
• Haegue Yang’s Instagram
• Artist profile page at kurimanzutto
• Tour of Haegue Yang’s Leap Year
• Survey at the Hayward (2024) with senior curator Yung Ma
• Artist profile page at MoMA

Haegue Yang FAQs

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