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 Chinese philosophy of Five Phases Theory (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 musical composition 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.
Haegue Yang: Through is curated by Jordan Carter, curator, and Min Sun Jeon, assistant curator.
Haegue Yang was born in Seoul in 1971. She works across media, ranging from room-size installations and performative sculptures to paper collages and staging projects, while engaging broad cultural, philosophical, and historical concerns. Combining industrial fabrication and folk craftsmanship, Yang explores the affective power of materials to blur the distinction between the modern and premodern. Recent solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Hayward Gallery, London (2024–25), and Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2025). Yang’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, in addition to the Venice Biennale (2009); Documenta, Kassel, Germany (2012); Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates (2015); Singapore Biennale (2022–23); and Shanghai Biennale (2025). Yang was awarded the 2018 Wolfgang Hahn Prize by Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the 2022 Benesse Prize at the Singapore Biennale. Yang teaches at her alma mater, the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. She lives in Berlin and Seoul.
Dia Beacon