I arrived in Venice for the 61st Biennale Arte on Sunday, early enough for the opening at Palazzo Diedo on Monday evening. I have visited a number of other Venice Biennales, although it was my first time to be there at the opening, and over the Bellinis in Diedo I asked a European dealer if I should face Arsenal the next day or Giardini. I had heard that they would be full on Wednesdays. Well, he said, I had to go to Giardini on Wednesday because that was the day all the protests were planned. I didn’t have the heart to explain that I needed to prioritize art, because I come from New York City, where conflict is not a significant thing. It’s part of your daily routine, like coffee.
But art and politics don’t always have to be in such stark opposition, as explored by “Star-Crossed Rendezvous,” an exhibition that recently opened at the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles that brings together two works by Haegue Yang (b. 1971) in the context of composer Isang Yun (1917-1995), whose work with Korean traditional music is combined with LA’s contemporary traditional music by Korea’s LAst featuring contemporary Korean music featuring two works by Haegue Yang (b. 1971) exhibition.
In 1967 the South Korean government’s intelligence service kidnapped Yun in West Berlin and charged him with spying for the North. International pressure secured his release after two years of captivity, but he never returned to Korea. At MOCA, Yang offers two pieces of dialogue with Yun’s music: Star-Crossed Rendezvous after Yun (2024), his first work directly addressing Yun and the subject of his recent research for the Hayward Gallery, and Sol LeWitt Face Down—K123456, Magnified 1078 Times, Doubled and Mirrored (2015). In 2024, Yang told Artnet during Hayward’s exhibition, “It has been a long-time desire for me to bring out Isang Yun.”
Yun’s installation feels like a relief. Yang’s medium classic of aluminum venetian blinds comes here in burgundy, ochre, blue, olive and silver, hung in stacked, stair-shaped volumes that rise in rough steps—an imaginary stepped pyramid. Two theater lights flicker on the choreography for Yun’s full 35 minutes Double Concert (1977), accompanied by 35 minutes of silence, the kind that comes from being able to stop thinking about something, finally.
The LeWitt piece on the other side of the gallery rhymes with all this re-introduction of neurosis. Here Yang took the shape of the 1997 LeWitt cube, doubled and mirrored its pyramidal stack, and repainted it with white monochromatic blinds lit by high-end fluorescents that gave a nod to Dan Flavin. You’ve explained what you do in the article, but that can’t capture the way you do it one step at a time. The blinds wrap LeWitt’s careful geometry into something dense and secretive, clean but understated by complexity. In the context of this exhibition it emphasizes the small impulse of protest, and shows that one does not need to protest to be a reformer.
“The Hague Yang: A Star-Crossed Rendezvous” is on view at MOCA Grand Avenue in Los Angeles through August 2, 2026.
More show updates
