One Fine Show: “Haegue Yang, Star-Crossed Rendezvous” at LA MOCA

May 8, 2026 / Sophie Clearwater /

“Haegue Yang: Leap Year” at Kunsthal Rotterdam in 2025. Photo: Marco De Swart, courtesy MOCA Los Angeles

I arrived in Venice for the 61st Biennale Arte on Sunday, early enough for the opening reception at Palazzo Diedo on Monday evening. I’ve visited a number of other Venice Biennales, though it was my first time being there for the opening, and over Bellinis at Diedo I asked a European dealer whether I should tackle the Arsenale the next day or the Giardini. I’d heard the latter would be crowded come Wednesday. Oh no, she said, I had to go to the Giardini on Wednesday because that was the day for which all the protests had been planned. I didn’t have the heart to explain that I needed to prioritize the art, because I am from New York City, where conflict is nothing remarkable. It’s just a part of your daily routine, like coffee.

But art and politics need not always be in such obvious opposition, as explored by “Star-Crossed Rendezvous,” a newly opened exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles that brings together two works by Haegue Yang (b. 1971) in the context of the composer Isang Yun (1917-1995), whose work blends Western modernism with Korean traditional music and has been performed by the L.A. Phil New Music Group for the exhibition.

In 1967 the South Korean government’s intelligence agency abducted Yun from 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 in dialogue with Yun’s music: Star-Crossed Rendezvous after Yun (2024), her first work directly addressing Yun and the centerpiece of her recent Hayward Gallery survey, and Sol LeWitt Upside Down—K123456, Expanded 1078 Times, Doubled and Mirrored (2015). In 2024, Yang told Artnet on the occasion of the Hayward show, “It has been a long-time wish for me to ‘exorcise’ Isang Yun out of me.”

The Yun installation does feel like relief. Yang’s classic medium of aluminum venetian blinds arrives here in burgundy, ochre, blue, olive and silver, suspended in stacked, terraced volumes that ascend in rough steps—a conceptual stepped pyramid. Two theatrical spotlights move across the work in choreography timed to the full 35 minutes of Yun’s Double Concerto (1977), which loops with 35 minutes of silence, the kind that comes from being able to stop thinking about something, at last.

The LeWitt piece on the other side of the gallery rhymes with all this by reintroducing neurosis. Here Yang has taken a 1997 LeWitt cube structure, doubled and mirrored its pyramidal stack, and rebuilt it from monochromatic white blinds lit by overhead fluorescents that nod to Dan Flavin. She’s explained what she does in the title, but that can’t really capture the way that it does more and less at the same time. The blinds collapse LeWitt’s meticulous geometry into something that’s dense and secretive, cleaner but less expressive by being more complex. In the context of this exhibition it emphasizes the minimalist impulse for dissent, and demonstrates how one doesn’t need to stage a protest to be a revolutionary.

“Haegue Yang: Star-Crossed Rendezvous” is on view at MOCA Grand Avenue in Los Angeles through August 2, 2026.