A Major Commission Connecting Dia Beacon’s Two Levels
 
《Haegue Yang: Through》 opened at Dia Beacon in New York State on October 10, 2026. On view through June 12, 2028, the exhibition is Yang’s largest commission in the United States. It also marks the first time an artist has conceived a new body of work connecting multiple galleries across the museum’s ground and lower levels. The exhibition is curated by Jordan Carter and Min Sun Jeon.
 
The exhibition takes its starting point from the building’s contrasting spatial conditions. Natural and artificial light, ground-floor and subterranean spaces, suspended structures and forms resting on the floor are brought into relation. Yang connects these differences through the cardinal directions and colors associated with East Asian Five Phases theory and the music of Isang Yun, shaping an exhibition that unfolds across both levels.
 
 
 
An Ongoing Engagement with Isang Yun, from MOCA Los Angeles to Dia Beacon
 
Central to the exhibition is Yang’s sustained engagement with the life and music of composer Isang Yun. For more than a decade, she has explored his legacy through archival research and artistic inquiry. Born in Korea, Yun moved to Germany and experienced political persecution and exile. His life, together with his synthesis of Eastern and Western musical traditions, has become a point of reference for Yang’s exploration of history and movement across cultures through abstraction.
 
This engagement was also evident in 《Haegue Yang: Star-Crossed Rendezvous》, presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), from February 24 to August 2, 2026. The exhibition brought together a Venetian-blind installation inspired by Sol LeWitt’s cube structures and Star-Crossed Rendezvous after Yun (2024), a work dedicated to the composer. In the latter, moving lights synchronized with Yun’s Double Concerto for Oboe, Harp, and Small Orchestra (1977) illuminate an arrangement of colored blinds. On March 10, a collaboration between MOCA and the Los Angeles Philharmonic linked a viewing of the installation with a live performance of the same composition.

Images: The Four Guardian Deities and a System of Cardinal Directions
 
At Dia Beacon, 《Through》 develops this inquiry through a different composition and a new spatial configuration. Its central musical reference is Yun’s quartet Images (1968), composed during his imprisonment. Recasting the Four Guardian Deities depicted in Goguryeo tomb murals in a contemporary musical language, the composition connects ancient imagery and East Asian thought with the timbres of Western instruments.

In Images, the Black Tortoise of the north corresponds to the flute, the Azure Dragon of the east to the oboe, the Vermilion Bird of the south to the violin, and the White Tiger of the west to the cello. The four instrumental voices retain their distinct identities as they emerge, overlap, and recede. Yang reconfigures this interplay through sculptural form, color, and movement. By aligning the directional and chromatic associations of Five Phases theory with the building’s orientation, she recasts the interplay among the instruments as a spatial experience encountered through the viewer’s movement.
 
Rather than playing as a soundtrack, Images informs the exhibition’s sculptural forms, colors, and choreography. Where Yun translated ancient imagery into a modern musical language, Yang unfolds that music through materials, light, and motion. His work thus becomes an organizing principle for an exhibition that traverses periods, geographies, and media.
 
 
 
Light, Material, and Movement across Four Works
 
The exhibition comprises four distinct yet interconnected works. On the ground floor, Tidal Field (2026) is an installation of dark Venetian blinds suspended in curving, draped formations. An industrial product composed of repeated horizontal slats bends and hangs to create a fluid configuration. Natural light passes through the blinds’ surfaces, revealing and concealing the surrounding space while bringing structural regularity into contact with the undulating forms.
 
The elongated forms of Fallen Field (2026) evoke the imoogi, a creature in Korean folklore poised between serpent and dragon. Spreading across the floor and climbing partway up the columns, the forms suggest a movement arrested between ascent and descent. This is Yang’s largest imoogi installation to date.

Nearby, Sonic Field (2026) consists of an expansive layer of bells placed over a string of light bulbs. Light filters through the densely arranged material, revealing both its mass and its interstices. The work brings the bells’ potential sound into dialogue with the light beneath them, engaging the viewer’s awareness of both sight and hearing.

On the lower level, Axial Flow (2026) comprises vertical metal louvers and moving lights. Aligned with the arrangement of the columns, the louvers rotate according to a programmed sequence, opening and closing the space. Their approximately forty-minute choreography is structured like a musical score: individual elements move at different speeds and in different directions before converging into a shared flow. The lights likewise draw on the directional colors of Five Phases theory and interact with the louvers’ movements. The movement and transformation suggested by the ground-floor works become actual motion on the lower level.

An Opening Program Connecting Installation and Live Music
 
To mark the opening, Dia organized a program that brought Yun’s music into the exhibition space. The October 10 program included a performance of Images by ensemble-in-residence Sejong Soloists in the lower-level gallery, preceded by a contextual lecture by musicologist Mina Lee. The lecture was conceived to examine the composition within the historical and biographical circumstances of Yun’s life, while tracing connections between his practice and Yang’s.
 
Where the MOCA project connected an installation viewing with a performance in a concert hall, the Dia Beacon program brought the music underlying the works into the galleries themselves. It offered audiences the opportunity to encounter the composition through live instrumental sound alongside its sculptural reinterpretation.
 
 
 
Music and Cultural Memory within a Minimalist Context
 
The exhibition brings music, mythology, and cultural memory into dialogue with Minimalism’s repetition and modularity and Postminimalism’s fluid forms. Where the MOCA exhibition placed Sol LeWitt’s sculptural language alongside Yun’s music, at Dia Beacon these connections extend into the organization of direction, light, and the viewer’s movement across two levels. Abstraction becomes a language through which different histories and experiences are connected.
 
With exhibitions of work by Roni Horn, Lee Ufan, and Kishio Suga continuing in nearby galleries, Yang’s project links multiple spaces across the ground and lower levels. This arrangement situates 《Through》 within the art-historical context that Dia Beacon has cultivated.
 
In 《Through》, Yun’s music underpins the interplay of direction, color, material, and movement. Viewers encounter these connections sequentially as they move among the works and between the museum’s two levels. Yang’s ongoing inquiry, which connected music, installation, and performance at MOCA Los Angeles, continues at Dia Beacon, where musical relationships are reimagined through space and movement.

About Haegue Yang
 
Born in Seoul in 1971, Haegue Yang lives and works in Seoul and Berlin. Working across installation, sculpture, collage, and performance, she explores cultural, philosophical, and historical concerns. She combines industrially manufactured objects, including Venetian blinds and bells, with craft-based methods, using light, sound, and movement to expand the sensory possibilities of materials.
 
Yang participated in the Venice Biennale in 2009 and Documenta in Kassel in 2012, and has held solo exhibitions at institutions including the Hayward Gallery, London, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize from Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in 2018 and the Benesse Prize at the Singapore Biennale in 2022. She is a professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

About Dia Beacon
 
Dia Beacon is a contemporary art museum operated by Dia Art Foundation near the Hudson River in Beacon, New York. Opened in May 2003 in a converted Nabisco box-printing factory, it presents Dia’s collection of art from the 1960s to the present, alongside special exhibitions and new commissions.
 
The museum retains the industrial building’s high ceilings, wide spans between columns, and abundant natural light, providing an environment for sustained encounters with large-scale works. Artist Robert Irwin and the architectural firm OpenOffice collaborated on the building’s conversion. In keeping with Dia’s commitment to long-term, in-depth presentations of individual artists’ work, the museum encourages an enduring relationship among artworks, architecture, and the viewer’s experience.
 
 
 
Exhibition Information
 
Exhibition: 《Haegue Yang: Through》
Dates: October 10, 2026–June 12, 2028
Venue: Dia Beacon, Beacon, New York, USA
Address: 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, New York 12508
Curators: Jordan Carter and Min Sun Jeon
Website: diaart.org