Leap Year

Haegue Yang: Leap Year
September 27, 2025 – January 18, 2026
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland

Installation view of Leap Year, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland, 2025
Photo: Studio Stucky

Installation view of Leap Year, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland, 2025
Video: Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst

Press Release (ENG)

Leap Year is the first survey exhibition by the Berlin and Seoul based artist Haegue Yang in Switzerland. Spanning over three decades of artistic exploration, Yang‘s work resists categorisation, intensely navigating the art historical boundaries between abstraction and figuration. Through diverse media, such as anthropomorphic sculpture, installation, essayistic video, and experiential text, Yang constructs constellations of works that challenge our understanding of contemporary life through intimacies woven between bodies and objects.

In exploring how movement, emotion, and sentiment function within various contexts, Yang’s oeuvre simultaneously reveals the personal and the collective, in other words, a holistic unfolding of memories and socio-cultural associations. Themes of identity, biography, and transnationality are central to her work, which reflect her subjective perceptions of the collective fabric of society. Drawing on folk tales and the experience of living and working between two continents over decades, her artistic world addresses the realities of migration and displacement.

The exhibition, Leap Year conveys this tension: the discomfort of navigating diverse cultural contexts is felt alongside the resilience and adaptation, and the ongoing processes of observation, learning and unlearning that characterise her peripatetic life. Throughout her prolific and expressive productions, Yang, however, remains somewhat enigmatic, offering only glimpses into possible links to her Korean heritage or extensive research. Her resulting exhibitions often endow presence to the space, filled with inquiry and the potentiality of discovery.

This survey exhibition is divided into four core themes: movement, spirituality, community, and domesticity. In Yang’s work, the theme of movement is associated with transitory experiences timely, physically, emotionally, and sociopolitically.

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

Curated by Dr. Michael Birchall (Kurator) with Paula Thomaka (assistant curator) Curatorial assistant: Linda Addae and Mirta Gianocca (trainees)

Exhibited works

Bathroom Contemplation, 2000

Cove, 2004

Dry Spell at Villeperdue, 2016

Eclectic Totemic, 2013

Hardware Store Collages, 2012-

Jahnstraße 5, 2017

Lacquer Paintings, 1994-

Mesmerizing Mesh, 2021-

Mesmerizing Pagoda Lanterns, 2021-

Mirror Series, 2006/2007

Non-Indépliables, Nues, 2010