Does the flower hear the bee?: the 15th Shanghai Biennale
November 8, 2025 - March 31, 2026
Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China
Installation view, Does the flower hear the bee?: the 15th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China, 2026
Photo: ©HaegueYang
Installation view of Does the flower hear the bee?: the 15th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China, 2026
Video: Studio Haegue Yang
Accommodating the Epic Dispersion – On Non-Cathartic Volume of Dispersion extends Yang’s ongoing engagement with migration, displacement, and the politics of visibility. The monumental structure of aluminum blinds forms a vast, yet porous field where opacity and transparency shift with the viewer’s movement.
Through layers of color and light, Yang turns industrial materials into a meditation on coexistence and fragmentation. The towering composition evokes both accumulation and dispersal—resonating with her research into diasporic figures such as Korean-Japanese writer and academic Suh Kyungsik (1951–2023), whose reflections on displacement and transnational belonging profoundly influenced her.
Depending on one’s position, the blinds alternately reveal and conceal, creating a dynamic interplay between comprehension and loss, proximity and distance. Yang’s “non-cathartic” approach resists resolution, offering instead a suspended, ever-shifting experience of dispersion.
Created for Quasi-Colloquial at Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Alien Colloquial is composed of six abstract “totems,” each devoted to a different theme: art and architecture, nature, immigration, crime, music, and dance. Drawing from Yang’s eclectic study of Brazil’s cultural landscape, the work assembles eyes, hands, and gestures of figures such as Tomie Ohtake, Lygia Clark, Cildo Meireles, and Lina Bo Bardi amid tropical fruits, instruments, and machines. In this mosaic of fragments, Yang cultivates an “uncolonized” mode of seeing—curious yet detached, empathetic yet estranged—where hybridity is preserved through deliberate fragmentation. Alien Colloquial extends Yang’s quasi-familiar stance as an outsider, transforming observation itself into a shared, shifting language of encounter.
Burgeoning Polyscopic Vista unfolds as a monumental non-hierarchical field where motifs drawn from the archives and laboratories of the Marie Curie Institute lose their scale, weight, and gravity in an abstract visualization of contemporary cancer research. Fragments of lab instruments, medical machines, and scientific diagrams collapse into one another, while a symmetrical, creature-like form emerges as if growing toward the future of the human body and its mystery. Burgeoning Polyscopic Vista is permanently installed at the lobby of the Curie Institute’s new building in Saint-Cloud, near Paris, and is on exhibition here, for the first time at another location.
Exhibited Works
Accommodating the Epic Dispersion – On Non-cathartic Volume of Dispersion, 2012
Burgeoning Polyscopic Vista, 2023