A Familiar Object, an Unfamiliar Landscape.

Venetian blinds descend from the ceiling, bend toward the floor, and rise into sweeping curves. Through their closely spaced slats, windows, columns, and visitors appear and disappear. At Dia Beacon, Haegue Yang transforms an object associated with privacy and the regulation of light into a way of encountering space.

Through is Yang’s largest commission in the United States. It is also the first newly conceived body of work by a single artist to connect multiple galleries across both levels of Dia Beacon. Its scale is immediately striking; its deeper significance emerges through the histories and relationships embedded in its materials.

The Artist Behind the Installation

Born in Seoul in 1971 and based in Seoul and Berlin, Yang works across sculpture and installation. She represented South Korea at the Venice Biennale in 2009, participated in Documenta in 2012, and created Handles for MoMA’s Marron Atrium in 2019.

Her materials often seem ordinary: blinds, bells, fans, and lights. Yet their arrangements draw on research into historical figures, political events, migration, and cultural memory. These references rarely become straightforward illustrations. Instead, they enter an abstract language that asks viewers to experience relationships before fully explaining them.

Tidal Field, 2026. Suspended blinds form sweeping curves against Dia Beacon’s windows and structural grid.

Why Dia Beacon?

Through was commissioned by Dia Art Foundation for this setting. Dia’s stated curatorial interest lies in how Yang’s engagement with repetition, time, and material both resonates with and redirects the artistic legacies central to its program.

The connection is visible in the blinds themselves. Repeated industrial units establish a geometric order, while their draping introduces gravity and fluidity. Yang brings music, mythology, and cultural histories into that encounter. The result can be read as an expansion of the conversation around Minimalism and Postminimalism.

The architecture also shaped Yang’s approach. In Dia’s published conversation with the artist, she describes recognizing the building’s sloping site as a starting point for considering its two levels together. Different openings to daylight become related but asymmetrical experiences.

Installation view of Through. Tidal Field unfolds among the building’s columns, windows, and changing daylight.

Isang Yun: Music as a Point of Connection

A central reference is Images (1968), a quartet by composer Isang Yun, whose life and work Yang has explored for more than a decade. His experience of political persecution and exile, alongside his engagement with Eastern and Western traditions, provides an important context for the exhibition.

Images connects four instruments with the Four Guardian Deities depicted in ancient Korean tomb murals: flute with the Black Tortoise, oboe with the Azure Dragon, violin with the Vermilion Bird, and cello with the White Tiger. Distinct instrumental voices disperse, overlap, and converge.

Yang reconfigures these relationships through sculpture, color, and movement. The music offers an organizing reference rather than a simple visual script. Her forms retain their own material origins, including the wave-like image that informed Tidal Field.

Tidal Field: Waves, Thresholds, and Directions

For Tidal Field, Yang imagined a moving wave. In her conversation with Dia, she describes achieving this curve with venetian blinds as a technical breakthrough. Their repeated slats remain legible even as the overall structure becomes fluid.

Tidal Field, 2026. Curving layers of perforated blinds alternately reveal and obscure the surrounding space.

Four low-hanging bell curtains are integral to the same work. Their directional arrangement draws on the Five Phases: black for north, blue for east, red for south, and white for west. A gold bell rope invokes yellow’s association with the center.

Tidal Field in the foreground and Fallen Field at right, both 2026. Suspended curves meet sprawling, fringed forms.

Sonic Field: Light Beneath the Bells

Sonic Field places a dense sheet of bells over a string of light bulbs on the floor. Light escapes through the gaps, drawing attention to both the material’s density and its openings. The bells carry the possibility of sound even when encountered as a still surface.

Sonic Field, 2026. Light bulbs glow beneath a densely arranged layer of bells. A bell curtain belonging to Tidal Field appears at right.

Axial Flow: From Suspended Form to Actual Motion

On the lower level, Axial Flow brings vertical metal louvers into a choreographed relationship with moving lights. Its alignment with the columns extends the exhibition’s engagement with architecture. The directional colors associated with the Five Phases return through light.

A bell curtain belonging to Tidal Field stretches across the foreground, with the installation’s suspended blinds beyond.

Moving Through, Looking Again

Through invites a reading of difference as a relationship. Industrial repetition meets fluid form; contemporary materials encounter ancient mythology; music becomes a reference for spatial experience. Viewers connect these elements through their own movement.

A few steps can change what is visible. A surface becomes a veil; an opening becomes a frame. Yang’s exhibition rewards both learning its histories and spending time with what its materia ls allow us to see.