I arrived in Venice for the 61st Art Biennale on Sunday, early enough for the opening reception at Palazzo Diedo on Monday evening. I’ve visited a number of other Venice Biennales, although it was my first time there for the opening, and over Bellinis in Diedo I asked a European dealer whether I should tackle the Arsenale the next day or the Giardini. I had heard that the latter would be crowded on Wednesday. Oh no, she said, I had to go to the Giardini on Wednesday because that was the day all the protests were planned for. I didn’t have the heart to explain that I had to prioritize art because I’m from New York City, where conflict is nothing out of the ordinary. It’s just a 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,” 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 This is one (1917-1995), whose work blends Western modernism with traditional Korean music and is performed by the LA Phil New Music Group for the exhibition.
In 1967, the South Korean government’s intelligence agency kidnapped Yun from West Berlin and accused him of 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 Encounter After Yun (2024), her first work to address Yun directly and the centerpiece of her recent Hayward Gallery survey, and Sol LeWitt Reverse-K123456, Expanded 1078 times, Duplicated and Mirrored (2015). In 2024, Yang told Artnet on the occasion of the Hayward show, “It has been a long-standing desire of mine to ‘exorcise’ Isang Yun from me.”
Installing Yun feels like a relief. Yang’s classic medium of aluminum venetian blinds arrives here in burgundy, ochre, blue, olive and silver, suspended in stacked volumes, with terraces ascending in rough steps—a conceptual stepped pyramid. Two theatrical spotlights move across the piece in choreographed choreography in Yun’s full 35 minutes Double concert (1977), which passes with 35 minutes of silence, the kind that comes from being able to stop thinking about something, finally.
LeWitt’s piece on the other side of the gallery rhymes with all this by reintroducing neurosis. Here Yang has taken a 1997 LeWitt cubic structure, doubled and mirrored its pyramidal stack, and reconstructed it from monochrome white curtains lit by overhead fluorescents that nod to Dan Flavin. She’s explained what she does in the title, but that can’t describe how she does less and less at a time. The blinds collapse LeWitt’s meticulous geometry into something that is dense and secretive, cleaner but less expressive by being more complex. In the framework of this exhibition, he emphasizes the minimalist impulse for dissent and shows how you don’t need to organize a protest to be revolutionary.
“Haegue Yang: Star-Crossed Encounter” is on view at MOCA Grand Avenue in Los Angeles through August 2, 2026.
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