Yang is known for combining industrially manufactured objects with store-bought, everyday items. Her large-scale sculptures and installations consist of starkly disparate materials, from clothing racks to jingle bells, space heaters to artificial straw. Hand-crafted techniques such as knitting and weaving lend her work a human touch, and blur the lines between these more domestic pursuits and fine art.
In recent years, her work has taken on a performative dimension, with moveable objects arrayed in increasingly elaborate choreographies. Mobility has long been implicit in Yang’s signature motif, the venetian blind—a permeable barrier that can be raised and lowered, used to block sightlines or let in more light.
Yang’s process is informed by meticulous research, but her references remain oblique, subsumed in a highly personal visual language that she refers to as “abstraction.” Her fascination with certain historical figures and movements is idiosyncratic and subjective, and she is careful to keep her work open to interpretation rather than fully resolved. She’s said, “maintaining an aporia between form and content, material and subject, abstraction and history, is an act of translating the struggle of one’s life.”

In 2018, Haegue Yand was awarded the Wolfgang Hahn Prize by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst, Museum Ludwig, Köln.

Yang’s work has been presented in solo exhibition by the following institutions: Tate St Ives, St Ives (2020); Museum Of Modern Art, New York (2019); The Bass, Miami Beach (2019); South London Gallery (2019); Museum Ludwig, Köln (2018); KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2017); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (2016); Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2016); UCCA Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2015); Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015); Tate Modern, London (2012); Kunsthalle Lingen (2011); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2011); New Museum, New York (2010); Walker Art Center (2009); South Korean Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2009) among others.

Her works are featured in the collection of numerous institutions, including the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, U.S.A.; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, U.S.A.; Museum Ludwig, Köln, Germany; Museum of Modern Art, New York, U.S.A.; M+, Hong Kong, China; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea; and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, U.S.A.