Haegue Yang: Through
October 10, 2026 – June 12, 2028
Dia Beacon, New York, USA
Installation view of Haegue Yang: Through, Dia Beacon, New York, USA, 2026
Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York
Press Release (ENG)
Haegue Yang’s largest commission in the United States, Through marks the first time an artist has conceived of works that entangle multiple galleries across Dia Beacon’s two levels. Responding to the site’s inherent dualities—light and dark, suspended and subterranean—and drawing on the ancient East Asian theory of the Five Phases (五行思想), Yang engages the building’s cardinal axes and maps their chromatic associations in traditional East Asian cultures. This bilateral presentation involves several discrete yet integrated works: An installation of dark, draped venetian blinds on the first floor is counterpointed by vertical metal louvers that are scaled and aligned to the lower-level columns, alongside a range of other dynamic elements. Throughout the exhibition, Yang variably transfigures Images (1968), a quartet by avant-garde composer Isang Yun, echoing his approach to embodying ancient entities through contemporary media. Yang’s commission complements and challenges both Minimalism’s unit-based geometries as well as Postminimalism’s fluid forms. It unfolds as an enduring inquiry into the porosity of opposing forces and the plurality of doubles, rendering movement, migration, and oscillation across cultures, histories, and states of being.
Curatorial Essay (ENG)
Each of my works should contain my whole music world. . . . Each small sound figure must contain the basic concept of the whole piece. — Isang Yun
Haegue Yang resists any singular way of understanding the world. She interweaves diverse materials and methodologies to bridge art and vernacular forms, creating objects and environments that are imbued with references from disparate geographies and timescales. In this exhibition, titled Through, Yang reimagines Korean avant-garde composer Isang Yun’s Images (1968) as a field of sculptural and time-based relations with bodily, conceptual, and political implications. In doing so, she engages Dia Beacon’s architectural conditions and mobilizes their dualities—natural and artificial light, the expansive and the enclosed, the elevated and the subterranean—proposing distinct elements that are contingent upon one another. Similarly, Yang’s visual language brings Minimalism’s modularity and Postminimalism’s fluidity into contact, complicating distinctions between the minimal and the maximal. Across the museum’s two levels, Yang’s installation explores how meaning and memory, as well as history and identity, shift through movement, succession, and changing proximities.
Yang’s long-standing engagement with Yun—reflecting on the possibility that his experience of political violence and exile during the upheavals of 20th-century Korea became both embodied in and obscured by his musical legacy—culminates in Images. Composed during his imprisonment by the South Korean government, this piece transfigures ancient imagery of the Four Guardian Deities from Goguryeo-dynasty murals into a contemporary musical language. Each deity symbolizes a color, element, and cardinal direction, in turn represented in Images by an instrument: flute for the Black Tortoise (north), oboe for the Blue Dragon (east), violin for the Red Phoenix (south), and cello for the White Tiger (west). Following the ancient East Asian theory of the Five Phases (五行思想), which conceives of cosmological wholeness through interrelation, the four combine to create a continual flux while each retains its respective identity. The quartet progresses as individual timbres emerge, overlap, and dissolve into one another within the heterophonic texture of the work. Intertwining Eastern philosophy with Western techniques, Images epitomizes what Yang calls the asymmetrical conditions—between politics and art, homeland and diaspora, primordial and modern—that marked Yun’s life and work and continue to shape how they are remembered.
At Dia Beacon, Yang abstracts and variably reconfigures the composition as an interplay of media, color, and movement. On the ground floor, these registers are anchored by Tidal Field (2026), a large-scale installation of venetian blinds suspended from the gridded structure attached to the ceiling beams and surrounded by clerestory windows. Scattered throughout the gallery and running toward the South Garden, the blinds’ draped, undulating layers seem at once to yield to gravity, resist its pull, and drift with an unseen current. As the natural light filters through their perforated surfaces, they simultaneously reveal and withhold, separate and connect with their surroundings, neither fully opaque nor transparent. The blinds evoke a state of transformation without ever completing it, inhabiting a threshold between stillness and motion.
Integral to Tidal Field, four low-hanging curtains of cascading strands of bells surround the blinds and align with the building’s cardinal orientation, also corresponding with the Five Phases theory, which assigns colors to the directions: black to the north, blue to the east, red to the south, and white to the west. A gold rope of bells—yellow is associated with the center in the theory—falls from a square canopy of blinds recalling the open structure of a traditional Korean pavilion, suggesting a celestial axis that joins earth and sky. Historically used in various cultures’ rituals to mediate between the secular and the spiritual, the bells here hover between material presence and sensory possibility. A comparable tension emerges in Sonic Field (2026), installed nearby, in which a densely woven sheet of bells is placed atop a string of light bulbs on the floor. The bulbs emit a soft glow that radiates through the interstices, rendering a luminous opacity.
The materials in Yang’s installation exceed their physical properties, carrying cultural memory and affective resonance. The elongated, serpentine forms of Fallen Field (2026) are handwoven from black plastic twine, spilling onto the floor and climbing partway up the columns before stalling in an arrested gesture of ascent (or descent). Evoking the tentacles of an imoogi—a creature in Korean folklore that is caught between earthly existence as a serpent and the mythical form of a dragon—the work embodies a state of becoming wherein transition is deferred or never assured. Beneath the woven forms, pom-poms in the four colors appear only in glimpses, recalling the wish-fulfilling jewel that signals the imoogi’s transmutation yet withholding its promise of completion. For Yang, the mythic and the ancient remain unfinished; she locates their generative potential as spaces of reparation, rather than repositories of fixed origins or an intact past, in the gaps between remembrance and oblivion. This renewing impulse similarly informs Yang’s engagement with weaving traditions and ornamental materials, unsettling conventional hierarchies between crafts, domestic labor, and fine art. Framed by the landscape beyond the windows, Fallen Field’s sinuous forms seem to reach toward the outside while tethered to the architecture, creating a spatial continuum across the sloping terrain that connects the ground-floor and lower-level galleries. What initially appears as a binary structure becomes a continuous topological field.
While each work in the upper level implies movement and transformation without fully enacting it, Axial Flow (2026), set downstairs, animates this latent potential, rearticulating the building’s structure through a series of perforated-metal louver configurations and roving lights. Three screens stretch between the columns, while a cell-like structure encloses a square space defined by four columns. Their alignment to the columnar grid introduces a dynamic rhythm that simultaneously reinforces and unsettles the existing spatial and bodily order. The louvers are further actuated through a programmed movement sequence, the individual slats rotating while the installation as a whole oscillates between openness and closure. Yang treats these louvers as a notational medium, structuring their approximately 40-minute choreography with the precision of a musical score: On a continuous loop, the sequence builds toward synchronization, then develops in an increasing complexity of patterns and shifting relations, reaching a climax before loosening and gradually settling back into its initial order. Movement varies in speed, direction, and cadence, distributed across the linear flow of the three screens and the cyclical motion of the cell; continually diverging and converging, the “figures” coalesce into an ever-transforming whole.
In parallel with the louvers’ mechanical movement, lights follow a related compositional arc, sweeping through the installation. Their relationship to the louvers varies, alternately accompanying their movement and guiding the orientation of the slats as their spatial and chromatic configurations change. The moving lights continue the directional logic through their associated five colors, with vinyl applied to the south window bathing the space in red. Filtered through successive layers of perforation, the lights generate shifting shadow patterns and moiré effects that extend into the surrounding architecture, acquiring sculptural presence of their own. As such, Axial Flow allows multiple temporalities and materialities to coexist, generating an environment in which forms are never static but are constantly recalibrated.
Over decades of living and working between multiple geographies, Yang has developed a practice in which movement is not simply the subject of the work but its operative condition. Through her recurring strategy of mobilizing historical proxies, such as Yun, Yang traverses temporal and physical coordinates, allowing histories, materials, and cultures to disperse and reassemble into imaginative, reparative spaces.
— Min Sun Jeon
Epigraph: Isang Yun and Luise Rinser, The Wounded Dragon: Dialogue with Isang Yun and Luise Rinser, trans. Jiyeon Byeon (Minsokwon, 2010), p. 139.
Exhibited work
Axial Flow, 2026
Fallen Field, 2026
Sonic Field, 2026
Tidal Field, 2026