A large-scale solo exhibition by Korean artist Haegue Yang is currently on view at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, Switzerland.

Opening on September 27, 2025, and running through January 18, 2026, the exhibition brings together more than twenty years of Yang’s major works alongside new commissions. Structured as a retrospective, the show serves as the final stop in her European tour following presentations at the Hayward Gallery in London and Kunsthal Rotterdam.

《Leap Year》— Balancing Time and Perceiving Boundaries

The title 《Leap Year》 derives from the concept of the ‘leap year’ itself.
 
Just as humanity inserts an ‘invisible day’ every four years to realign time, Yang explores the artistic act of adjusting the world’s temporal and cultural irregularities through sensory perception.
 
For her, the ‘leap year’ is not simply a technical correction of time but a metaphor for humanity’s emotional and structural effort to regain balance.

《Leap Year》broadens the perceptual scope of contemporary art through themes of temporal imbalance, migration, and sensory boundaries.
 
Working between Berlin and Seoul, Yang has consistently examined ‘migration’, ‘hybridity’, and ‘the limits of sensory language’. This exhibition serves as a condensed articulation of her visual and material vocabulary, centering on the harmony found within discontinuity and movement across borders.
 

 
Thinking Through the Senses

At the entrance stands Yang’s new work Sonic Droplets in Gradation – Water Veil (2024), a signature installation for the exhibition.
 
Composed of metal bells, the curtain-like piece vibrates and resonates subtly as visitors pass through, transforming the act of crossing into an integral part of the artwork.
 
Sound and movement stimulate tactile rather than purely visual perception, turning the visitor’s passage itself into an embodied experience.

Throughout the galleries, familiar materials such as Venetian blinds, drying racks, knitting yarn, and metal spheres—long central to Yang’s practice—are rearranged into unfamiliar sculptural compositions. Functional objects lose their original roles, becoming abstract structures that evoke “the strangeness of the familiar.”
 
Through these transformations, Yang reveals the intersection between material language and human sensation—where ‘seeing converges’ with ‘bodily awareness.’

Curator Raphael Stucky explains, “Yang’s work translates the distance between language, body, and memory into a sculptural language, enabling us to comprehend the world through hearing and touch rather than sight.”
 
By shifting from vision to sound, and from static objects to bodily experience, the exhibition proposes an alternative way of perceiving the world—thinking through sensation—and illustrates how the art of a Korean artist can communicate through a truly universal language.

Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst

The Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst is a leading institution in Swiss contemporary art, known for its experimental programs that blend artistic practice with social engagement. Upholding a Free Entry policy, it has long emphasized accessibility and the public dimension of art.
 
《Leap Year》aligns closely with this institutional philosophy. Yang’s approach—a “democratization of the senses”—moves beyond vision-dominated viewing toward embodied and auditory engagement, resonating with the museum’s curatorial direction.
 
The exhibition also represents a rare multi-institutional collaboration within Europe that examines a single artist’s practice in depth, underscoring how Korean contemporary art is establishing an independent presence in the global dialogue.
 
The Migros Museum has previously introduced Korean artists to international audiences.
In 2019, Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho presented their collaborative project《The End of the World and the End of the World》, a large-scale video and installation work exploring human anxiety and collective imagination, which received critical acclaim.

Artist Profile

Haegue Yang (b. 1971, Seoul)

Yang studied sculpture at Seoul National University and completed postgraduate studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main.
 
Based in Berlin and Seoul, she has participated in major international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale (2009, 2015), documenta 13 (2012), Tate Modern, Sharjah Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and MoMA New York.
 
Her work explores the boundaries between the individual and the collective, the public and the private, and between industrial materials and sensory emotion. Her representative works include Series of Venetian Blinds, Sonic Figures, The Intermediate – Uninhabited House Series.
 

 
Exhibition Information

Title:《Haegue Yang: Leap Year》
Dates: September 27, 2025 – January 18, 2026
Venue: Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich
Curator: Raphael Stucky
Partner Institutions: Hayward Gallery (London), Kunsthal Rotterdam (Rotterdam)
Official Website: migrosmuseum.ch