Haegue Yang presents her solo exhibition Haegue Yang: Through at Dia Beacon. Staged across the museum’s two levels, the exhibition is Yang’s first solo presentation with Dia Beacon and marks the first time an artist has conceived of a new body of work spanning the entirety of the building’s stacked architectural volumes. Since its founding in 1974, Dia Art Foundation has served as a “conduit” for artists to realize pioneering and ambitious projects that would otherwise be difficult to achieve due to limitations of scale or scope, as embodied in its very name that derived from the Greek word dia (διά), meaning “through.” Closely tied to the institution’s identity and mission, the exhibition presents four new commissions by Yang. In particular, Haegue Yang: Through will remain on view for approximately twenty months, unlike museum and gallery exhibitions that typically run for several months, welcoming visitors from around the world.

The exhibition attends to the museum’s seemingly opposing architectural conditions, taking as its starting point the architecture’s distinct dualities—natural and artificial light, the elevated and the subterranean—while treating them not as fixed oppositions, but as relational, oscillating processes or states of being. Yang applies the East Asian Five Phases theory, which holds that distinct principles and elements form a single whole through interconnected, cyclical relationships, to the placement and colors of her works, revealing within the structure of the exhibition the transformations that arise between them. Central to the exhibition is the late composer Isang Yun (1917–1995). His quartet Images (1968) assigns to its individual instruments the cardinal directions and colors associated with the Four Guardian Deities in the Goguryeo-period tomb mural of the Great Tomb of Gangseo from the late 6th to the early 7th century. Further intertwined into all four works of Yang, Yun’s musical piece serves as a key point of departure for the conceptual and spatial framework of the exhibition.

Working across a broad range of media and scales, from paper collage, video, and sound works to performance, sculpture, and large-scale installations, Yang juxtaposes the affective distinctions between industrial fabrication and folk craftsmanship as a methodology to complicate the notion of modernity. Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director, comments as follows: “Dia has long invited artists to respond to the scale, light conditions, and material presence of its distinctive spaces. In Through, Yang extends this history while reframing it through her singular lens.” Marking the opening of the exhibition, the string ensemble Sejong Soloists performed a chamber concert of Yun’s Images in the lower-level gallery of Dia Beacon on October 10. The exhibition will be on long-term view through June 12, 2028.