Haegue Yang

Yang works across sculpture, installation, video, and paper collage, often combining domestic materials and household objects with references to migration, folklore, and abstraction. She was born on December 12, 1971, in Seoul, South Korea, and earned a BFA from Seoul National University in 1994. She spent an exchange year at The Cooper Union in New York in 1997, then completed a Meisterschuler degree at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 1999, the school where she has been a professor of Fine Arts since 2017. She lives and works in Berlin and Seoul.

Her international profile grew through a series of major institutional exhibitions and biennial appearances, including the South Korea Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and participation in Documenta 13 in 2012. A mid-career survey, ETA 1994 to 2018, opened at Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2018, the same year she received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize. She was later awarded the 13th Benesse Prize at the Singapore Biennale in 2022. She is currently represented by Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris, Kurimanzutto in Mexico City and New York, and Dependance in Brussels, among others.

Yang's critical reception has tracked closely with a fast accumulation of institutional honors: the Baloise Art Prize in 2007, the Cremer Prize in 2008, national representation at the Venice Biennale in 2009, participation in Documenta 13 in 2012, and the Wolfgang Hahn Prize and the Republic of Korea Culture and Arts Award, both in 2018, the same year Museum Ludwig staged her mid-career survey. Museums have consistently framed her work as an expansion of sculpture and installation into questions of migration, craft, and everyday materials, and the pace of her survey exhibitions, at Tate St Ives in 2020, at Hayward Gallery beginning in 2024, and with new commissions arriving at MOCA Los Angeles and Dia Beacon in 2026, indicates an artist still building toward a fuller institutional accounting of her career.

Public auction data for Yang is sparse relative to her institutional standing. The highest priced lot identified in available public auction records is HKD 533,400 for a work titled Over the Waves and Trails, Trustworthy #87 to #104, sold at Phillips in Hong Kong; the exact sale date is not confirmed in public listings. Other documented Phillips results include GBP 30,480 for Series of vulnerable arrangements, a pair of halves and GBP 24,130 for Sonic Rotating Geometry Type F, Copper and Nickel plated #63, again without confirmed sale dates. Artsy separately confirms auction results above USD 50,000 without specifying the underlying lot. A work was offered with an estimate of 70 million to 150 million KRW at K Auction in Korea in early 2025, but no confirmed final sale price for that lot is publicly available. Collectors should treat any single auction result for Yang as a thin, incompletely documented data point rather than a stable benchmark.

Yang's market signal is almost entirely institutional rather than transactional: deep museum collection holdings, a heavy schedule of surveys and biennials, and consistent gallery representation, set against a public auction record that is both small in volume and modest in price relative to her institutional peers. There is no published catalogue raisonne; verification runs through her representing galleries. For a collector, that combination means her institutional trajectory is the stronger available signal, and any auction pricing should be read with real caution given how few results exist.