WHEN THE ARTIST Haegue Yang shows old artworks in new places, she likes to create a fresh piece that links the exhibition to the local context. For her current presentation at the Bass, a museum in Miami Beach, Yang asked the curators what the region’s famously multicultural residents have in common. A particular holiday? A certain food? Not really, they told her. “But isn’t there any commonality you can think of?” she asked. The curators looked at one another. “Hurricanes,” they said, half joking.

The notion of violent storms as a binding force fascinated the 48-year-old South Korean artist, whose sculptures, room-size environments and videos often address themes of individual and national identity, displacement, isolation and community. After months of meteorological research, Yang produced a new work for the Bass show: “Coordinates of Speculative Solidarity,” a chaotic floor-to-ceiling digital collage swirling with storm-tracking symbols, satellite photos of Floridian McMansions, distorted palm trees and sinister gyres that covers vast swathes of the museum like dystopian wallpaper. The show is called “In the Cone of Uncertainty,” which in forecasting terms refers to hurricane projection but might as well be a description of Yang’s overall philosophy.

Over the past decade, Yang’s work has appeared at some of the most esteemed contemporary art forums in the world — including Documenta in Kassel, Germany, and the Venice Biennale — and she recently filled the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York with an ambitious installation blending sculpture and performance. With sensual, melancholy works made from venetian blinds and other domestic objects, Yang has managed to escape the conspicuous identity politics that define much of the contemporary art world. “Every institution now wants to be global and to have a more international and cosmopolitan point of view, but what does that really mean?” asked Stuart Comer, MoMA’s chief curator of media and performance, who organized Yang’s exhibition. At its worst, it can mean that non-Western artists are tacitly required to represent (or perform) the cultures they came from. Just as the institutions of the 1980s and ’90s seized on artists creating work around their socially marginalized identities (female, gay, nonwhite), it sometimes feels as though the current art world showcases people born outside the United States or Europe only on the grounds that their art refers to their heritage. Yang, however — an artist who is not known to spend more than a few days or weeks at a time in any given place — takes a stubbornly elliptical approach, refusing to embody any single nationality or perspective in her work. By embracing ambiguity, Yang has found a way to make art about identity without tying herself to one based on gender, race or geography. “You cannot reduce it to a political one-liner,” said Comer.