Over the past three decades, Haegue Yang has developed a prolific and hybrid body of work that envelops folk traditions into the canon of modern and contemporary sculpture-making. Informed by in-depth exploration into vernacular techniques and related customs and rituals, and her continual movement through and within disparate cultures, Yang's works subvert modernist ideas of sculpture through their materiality and references to the undervalued histories of non-Western culture.

About Haegue Yang  

Haegue Yang was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1971. Since the mid-1990s, Yang has lived and worked in Seoul and Berlin and currently teaches at her alma mater, the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Her immersive multimedia environments combine diverse materials and cultural traditions with references ranging from scientific phenomena and sociopolitical narratives to art history. Using a range of industrial objects and intensive, craft-based techniques, her works make connections between divergent worlds of contemporary mass production, ancient civilizations and natural phenomena.  

Yang regularly exhibits at key international museums and biennales, and her work is represented in institutional and private collections all over the world. She has been the subject of over 60 solo shows and projects at institutions, including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2009); the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2010); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2012); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2018); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2020); Tate St Ives (2020); SMK – National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2022); Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2023) and S.M.A.K., Ghent (2023).    

Her work has also featured in around 170 group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2009), the Gwangju Biennale (2010), Documenta 13, Kassel (2012), the Taipei Biennial (2014), the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT), Brisbane (2015), the Biennale of Sydney (2018) and the Singapore Biennale (2022). The Hayward Gallery, London is currently presenting a survey show of Yang’s work.