Press Release

For the first time in Switzerland, the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst presents a survey exhibition of the Berlin- and Seoul-based artist Haegue Yang. Leap Year brings together Yang’s work from the early 2000s to the present. Central to her work are themes of migration, displacement, and cross-cultural perspectives, often drawn from personal and broader historical contexts. Yang invites audiences to contemplate established narratives and reflect on their own lived experiences and identities, while often highlighting underrepresented figures of modernism. At the core of her practice is an aim to engage viewers, ensuring they do not remain indifferent to the layers of meaning embedded in her art.

Leap Year features new commissions and productions, offering a multisensory experience through installation, sculpture, collage, text, video, wallpaper, and sound. Yang transforms everyday items such as drying racks, nylon pom-poms, hand-knitted yarn, and lightbulbs in her work. These objects are familiar and easily identifiable, yet they present themselves to the spectator with ambiguity. Yang’s sculptures often possess anthropomorphic qualities, which can evoke feelings of empathy or sympathy. Highlights in the exhibition include the new commission, “Sonic Droplets in Gradation – Water Veil” (2024), where visitors walk through a curtain of bells, and the mobile performative sculpture “Sonic Dress Vehicle – Hulky Head” (2018). Both of these works reflect Yang’s focus on modular structures and the interplay of geometry and movement, enriched by references to East Asian traditions and modernism. Additionally her series, “The Intermediates” (2015-) draws from shamanistic and global weaving traditions, and incorporates materials such as artificial straw.

The exhibition is organised by the Hayward Gallery, London in association with Kunsthal Rotterdam and Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.

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About the Artist

Haegue Yang is an artist known for her subtle use of mundane objects within sensory installations. Yang graduated with a BFA from Seoul National University, then attended Städelschule Frankfurt am Main, Germany, receiving an MFA in 1999. Today, she lives and works in Seoul and Berlin.

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About the Gallery
Since its founding in 1996 the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst sees itself as a site of reflection as well as production. The moving in together with other art institutions and galleries in the spaces of a former Zurich brewery, the Löwenbrau-Areal, was at the same time the birth of the museum in its present-day form. The active cooperation in the process of art production and continual furthering of it with exhibition activities linked to the collection has determined the history of the museum.

Through a processual lightness the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst sets itself apart from its larger, more venerable colleagues. The museum focuses more on large-scale productions in close cooperation with the artists and less on that which is already tried and tested. In this manner the term contemporary art is understood as having a dynamic temporal purpose, of which the permanent exploration of peering forwards and backwards in time is inherent. Simultaneously the term embedment in a societal context and participation in a process of exchange and production of art is implied. The exhibitions at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst formulate art history as a moving process, which is open to investigations, corrections and variations. The integration of the collection into a lively environment contiguous and supporting contemporary art production directed at an open-minded public is a further concern of the museum.
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Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst
Limmatstrasse 270, Zurich, Switzerland
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