Functionally speaking, blinds exist in a kind of in-between. They’re less rigid than shutters, yet far more structured than curtains. Their slats tilt against each other so even drawn completely shut, light still spills through the cracks, finding its way to the other side. When the slats are tilted wide open, the view beyond remains fragmented, interrupted by a rhythm of horizontal panels. To see through a set of blinds without obstruction requires one to step closer and peer between its slats, or to pull the cord and fold them all the way up to the top of the window.

For South Korean artist Haegue Yang, blinds are similarly fascinating, and have served as a material of study and exploration within her work for more than 20 years. Yang’s interest in the object as a medium is largely threefold. The first is their formal geometry—the measured rhythm of horizontal lines, the cadence of slats and spaces. Another is their social character; ready-made, blinds are ordinary, connected to domestic life and daily routines. A more philosophical dimension occupies Yang’s third layer of interest. “Blinds filter visibility and reorganize perception,” Yang tells me. Yet, their impact is no less physical. “They block and reveal at the same time. They channel movement and attention, and they occupy space in a half-transparent way—neither fully open nor fully closed.”

Venetian blinds are the dominant material in Star-Crossed Rendezvous after Yun (2024), a monumental installation organized by Paula Kroll, Assistant Curator, with Clara Kim, Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The installation will be making its US debut at MOCA Grand Avenue from February 24th through August 2nd (accompanied by a concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall of Isang Yun’s Double Concerto [1977] by the LA Philharmonic on March 10th). In the installation, which premiered at her exhibition Leap Year at Hayward Gallery in London in 2024, Yang constructs an expansive form that evokes an ascending staircase, though one that cannot be climbed in any conventional sense.

Instead, the staircase takes us somewhere through an interplay between its grand steps and a choreography of light and sound that envelops the space. Each element connects to the other but also exists entirely on its own, as if dancing in parallel planes.

Two moving spotlights illuminate the structure on either end, but they are not only there to illuminate. “For me, light is a haptic being—something that penetrates the surface of abstraction not through the syntax of didactics, but through the senses,” she says. “It doesn’t explain the object; it touches it.” Yang sometimes describes this process—the way in which light interacts with and intensifies the installation’s physicality—as “massaging” the blinds. “Light activates [the blinds’] muted vitality and makes the slats feel vital, plastic, unstable, and permeable,” she explains. “Through shadow, glare, and shifting angles, it loosens the object from its staticness and turns what seems fixed into something continuously in flux.”

If light animates the work’s surface, sound forms its conceptual backbone. Star-Crossed Rendezvous after Yun directly activates Double Concerto by Korean-born composer and political dissident Isang Yun, played through speakers positioned on either side of the blind structure. Yun’s composition draws inspiration from a Korean folktale about a princess and her husband, a cowherd, whose union enrages her father, the Heavenly King. The king punishes the couple by banishing them to opposite ends of the galaxy. Their sorrow is said to have flooded the earth with tears until sympathetic birds formed a bridge, allowing the star-crossed lovers to reunite once a year. Yang’s installation, according to Hayward Gallery curator Yung Ma, echoes this narrative through its architectural form: the blind structure reads as a staircase but also as a suspended, incomplete bridge, holding apart as much as it connects. Unlike light, which articulates form and distance instantaneously, Yun’s score unfolds over time, carrying tension, longing, and history with it. Ma notes that Yang is commenting, through form, light, and music, on the unresolved tension between the two Koreas in the contemporary moment.

A singular meaning of a piece, however, is never fixed in Yang’s work. “Narrative can be seductive, because it produces a strong sense of meaning,” she asserts. “But even the most convincing story has a cost: it makes one trajectory visible while leaving others behind.” Yang thinks of narrative, instead, as a departure point, whereas abstraction is where she wants the work to settle. It is through abstraction, she says, that her work can hold more than one register at once, without collapsing history and its nuances into a single narrative.

Yun himself was no stranger to the condensing of history and meaning, surely a guiding reason as to why Yang took him up as a subject. Neither his life nor his art, Yang notes, can be separated from the political violence that shaped it, from notions of division and exile to Cold War ideology and the ongoing tensions of the Korean Peninsula. Most well-known is the 1967 East Berlin Affair, during which Yun was abducted by the South Korean government, imprisoned, tortured, and wrongfully charged with committing espionage for North Korea. Yang emphasizes that this event “was not simply a biographical episode, but a rupture that reorganized how his life and work could unfold thereafter.” While Yun is often remembered for that event, Yang says that many people know him more as a symbolic name than as a composer whose work is regularly heard. For Yang, this gap became the impetus for her exploration of Yun. “Yun is a name that most Koreans recognize. But why was I so unfamiliar with his music?”

And while the historical material of Yun’s life and work was Yang’s departure point rather than the work’s arrival, perhaps there comes a time when one must return from where they’ve departed. Last November, Yang and MOCA grounded Star-Crossed Rendezvous after Yun with a day-long symposium commemorating Yun’s musical legacy, including performances by musicians from LA’s Colburn School and lectures by musicology scholars Jung-Min “Mina” Lee and Ryan Dohoney. Given how limited Yun’s presence has been in the US, particularly in California, Yang saw the symposium as an opportunity to engage with Yun’s work in new ways with an audience largely unfamiliar with his repertoire. “Even today, while there are important specialists and committed listeners, Yun remains relatively unfamiliar in many US cultural spaces compared to other 20th-century composers whose work has been more regularly circulated,” Yang posits. “For me, that distance did not register as a lack so much as an opening. In California, Yun’s work has not been overdetermined by an established audience reception, and that created the possibility of unfolding him anew—through listening, attention, and curiosity rather than through recognition.”

During the symposium, Lee talked about how both Yun’s Double Concerto and Yang’s installation meditate on distance—spatial, temporal, and relational—and the possibility of convergence (or an eventual rendezvous). Yang’s work is, to Lee, characterized by continual revisiting and re-remembering, revealing a sense of time that is, together, happening all at once, rather than strictly linear. As a result, both Yang and Yun, and their respective works, exist simultaneously across the past, present, and future. Just as Yang thinks of Yun as a porous figure, “where time can wrap and where conceptual leaps become possible,” Yang, and her sprawling blind sculpture no less, creates and exists unhindered by any particular boundary, whether imposed by time or mankind. Her work—like history, and so too like blinds—exists in a kind of in-between, never fully open or closed.

The exhibition Haegue Yang: Star-Crossed Rendezvous is on view from February 24 - August 2, 2026 at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles.