Haegue Yang Lecture

Haegue Yang, Approaching: Choreography Engineered in Never-Past Tense, 2012, dOCUMENTA (13). Photo: Nils Klinger

Join us for a lecture by artist Haegue Yang followed by an audience Q&A.

Doors open at 5:45 p.m. Free and open to the public. Registration is not required. Explore the Visiting Artists Program homepage for visitor information, recordings of past events, and more.

Since the mid-1990s, Haegue Yang (b. 1971 in Seoul, South Korea) has lived and worked in Seoul and Berlin and currently teaches at her alma mater, the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Spanning a vast range of media—from collage to kinetic sculpture and room-scaled installations—Yang’s work links disparate histories and traditions in a visual idiom all her own. The artist draws on a variety of craft techniques and materials and the cultural connotations they carry: from drying racks to Venetian blinds, hanji paper to artificial straw. She is known for her multisensory environments that activate perception beyond the visual, creating immersive experiences that treat issues such as labor, migration, and displacement from the oblique vantage of the aesthetic. Ensuring that her references remain wayward and personalized, Yang prizes fluidity over unified narratives. “Maintaining an aporia between form and content, material and subject, abstraction and history, is an act of translating the struggle of one’s life,” she has said. 

A recipient of the Wolfgang Hahn Prize in 2018 and the 13th Benesse Prize at the Singapore Biennale in 2022, Yang has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at museums around the world, including Hayward Gallery, London (2024); Helsinki Art Museum (2024); Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2023), SMK – Statens Museum for Kunst, National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2022); the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2020); Tate St Ives, United Kingdom (2020); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (2020); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2018); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016); Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2012); and the Korean Pavilion of the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009).

Yang’s solo exhibition Star-Crossed Rendezvous is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles from February 24 to August 2, 2026. Her solo exhibition Through is opening at DIA Beacon on October 10, 2026

This event will be live captioned by Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) services. The auditorium is wheelchair accessible and hearing assisted devices are available. For additional access requests, visit saic.edu/access.