InterviewHaegue Yang's floating tree takes root in Taiwan

Korean artist Haegue Yang presents "Liquid Votive – Tree Shade Triad" (2025), her tallest venetian blind installation to date, in the shape of an inverted tree. The work is the inaugural site-specific commission for the new Taichung Art Museum in Taiwan. Courtesy of the artist, Taichung Art Museum and Kukje Gallery

TAICHUNG, Taiwan — Dangling in the soaring, light-bathed atrium of the new Taichung Art Museum is a 24-meter-tall “tree,” improbably hanging upside down.

Trees, of course, are meant to root themselves in the earth. But in artist Haegue Yang’s vision, gravity is quietly overturned.

The result is “Liquid Votive — Tree Shade Triad,” a floating form in which deep green venetian blinds become branches and leaves, while LED tubes coil around it like the straw garlands tied around divine trees in Korean shamanism. At night, laser lights flicker and dart across its surface like fireflies in the forest.

Using industrial materials, Yang reimagines sacred trees, long revered as communal guardians across Asia — from Korea’s “dangsan namu” to Taiwan’s “dashugong.”

Haegue Yang's "Liquid Votive — Tree Shade Triad" (2025) / Courtesy of the artist, Taichung Art Museum and Kukje Gallery

“Liquid Votive” is her tallest installation to date, its scale unmistakable as the inverted tree never leaves visitors’ sight as they climb the building’s spiraling six-story ramp. The piece is part of the Taichung Art Museum’s inaugural site-specific commission, serving as its symbolic face for the next two years.

“Because the work is so large, it seems to draw closer or recede depending on where the viewer stands. Its uppermost sections even spill beyond the ramp,” the 54-year-old said in an interview at the museum a day before its grand opening on Dec. 13.

Museums, she added, tend to insist that artworks remain neatly contained within prescribed boundaries. “But like the creeping branches of an ancient tree, this one stretches outward, extending beyond the space it’s been given.”

The scale and form of “Liquid Votive” were inspired by a field trip Yang took this year to the forests of Taichung, where she encountered the Taiwanese tradition of venerating giant trees.

“What does it really mean, physically, for something to be large?” she asked. “It can feel oppressive, even domineering. But that wasn’t what I sensed in these trees. I was drawn instead to a feeling of openness, something you look up to with clarity. Something respectable, yet familiar. And at night, it becomes something mysterious and mystical.”

To her, largeness is inseparable from age, which in turn led her to think about animism, the ancient belief that spirit permeates all things.

“A great waterfall, a massive rock, an enormous tree — they’re big, but they don’t feel ‘spectacular’ in the way modern civilization defines spectacle. What they evoke instead is respect.”

Haegue Yang's "Liquid Votive — Tree Shade Triad" (2025) / Courtesy of the artist, Taichung Art Museum and Kukje Gallery

The atrium that holds Yang’s commission, with its 27-meter-high ceiling and sunlight pouring in through vast expanses of glass, presented a singular challenge. Rather than a sealed white cube, the space is a transparent volume wrapped in an outer skin of metal mesh, open to light, weather and time.

“This isn’t a completely clinical, climate-controlled room,” she said. “In many ways, it’s a wild space — one that makes it difficult to install ‘ordinary’ works. It’s a bit like the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern [in London].”

Yet it was precisely this difficulty that ultimately drew her in, despite being invited to take on the project just a year before the museum was set to open.

“I was definitely baited,” she noted with a smile. “You’re given an entire space of this scale to work with on your own. And it’s a place no one has dealt with before, because it’s a new museum. I like taking on that role, where how I approach the space can help set the tone and direction for what comes next.”

Making full use of the shifting light that floods the atrium over the course of the day, the artist conceived the work as a two-phase being that moves between day and night. The angle of the light, its temperature, the weather — these environmental elements become parameters that influence the very being of the work.

To allow visitors to experience these different states, “Liquid Votive” remains visible long after the museum’s closing hours. Seen from the surrounding park until 10 p.m., its luminous structure drew in dog walkers and nighttime strollers alike on the opening weekend.

"Liquid Votive" remains visible from the surrounding park, even when the Taichung Art Museum is closed. Courtesy of the artist, Taichung Art Museum and Kukje Gallery

While the piece will retain its vertically monumental form for the next two years, Yang has already envisioned its life beyond the commission. The installation can be modulated and reconfigured into three separate units that can be placed side by side.

“There just aren’t that many buildings in the world with a ceiling height of 27 meters, so from the beginning, I worked with the assumption that this work would one day need to live inside a more typical gallery,” she explained.

That foresight reflects her belief that artworks must be thought about far beyond the duration of a single exhibition.

Haegue Yang's "Lingering Nous" (2016) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris / Courtesy of the artist and Kukje Gallery

“A work isn’t made just for the here and now, but with 50 or even 100 years in mind. I show my work internationally, but I’ve reached a point where entering institutional collections matters deeply to me as well, so that a piece can be taken out again and again, researched and reassessed over time,” the artist said. “If there are 100 exhibitions, fewer than 10 percent result in acquisition.”

Such thinking inevitably leads to practical questions of how an installation might be adapted or transformed in ways that allow it to remain mobile — and alive.

Yang already confronted these concerns in 2016, when she presented the large-scale blind installation “Lingering Nous” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Composed of four distinct masses, the work entered the museum’s collection and was subsequently reconfigured as it traveled across Pompidou’s global network, including KANAL in Brussels, the Centre Pompidou X West Bund Museum Project in Shanghai and the Centre Pompidou Málaga in Spain.

Making use of the shifting light that floods the museum's atrium over the course of the day, Haegue Yang conceived "Liquid Votive" as a two-phase being that moves between day and night. Courtesy of the artist, Taichung Art Museum and Kukje Gallery

Despite her status as one of the most in-demand artists working today — a standing underscored by her regular appearance on ArtReview’s Power 100 list, the annual ranking of the art world’s most influential figures — Yang is clear about where her attention does not lie. How her work is evaluated, she said, is neither her concern nor her domain.

“I focus on being a practitioner,” she said. “What I do is create phenomena that can spark dialogue, almost like agents provocateurs for society and humanity. How that work is actually received, I’m not curious about it, and I don’t consider it my territory. If I’m criticized, I accept it. If I’m welcomed, I accept that, too. That’s all there is.”

Viewers, she added, inevitably project their own frameworks onto her work and onto her as a creator. “Some people see me as an Asian artist, others as a woman artist; some see me as Korean, others as diasporic. An artist is, by nature, a surface for projection. There are parts of that image I’ve shaped myself, but increasingly, it’s society that constructs it. In that sense, my own opinion doesn’t feel all that important.”

In Taichung, Yang recedes once more, leaving the work to stand on its own — or rather, to hang suspended between earth and sky.