This year’s Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is an anomaly. Curated by commissioner Seungduk Kim, the co-director of Le Consortium in Dijon, the pavilion features Kimsooja’s installation ‘To Breathe: Bottari’ (2013), for which the artist covered the building’s inner surface with mirrors and diffraction grating film sheets. From afar, the pavilion resembles a crystal palace, or a pseudo-architecture that dissipates into the air like a mirage. Only a dozen or so visitors are allowed to enter the translucent pavilion at a time, forming a noticeably long queue during the preview week— giving the act of entering the feel of a privilege or a sacred ritual. At the entrance, the friendly guides tell the visitors to take off their shoes, another ritualistic activity before visitors willingly submit themselves to the pavilion with nothing inside except light and warmth. In a corner tucked in the pavilion, the artist also constructed Breathe: Blackout (2013), a small anechoic chamber of absolute darkness in which only one person at a time can experience the nothingness. The phenomenological exhibition of illumination and blackness as a whole is an anomaly for two reasons. It seems, at least on the surface, far removed from the artist’s previous works, which of ten prey on culturally specific metaphors with a global spin. Additionally, it creates a visual disjuncture from the rest of the Venice Biennale, which I will discuss later. It is a fantastically orchestrated anomaly that is the hidden jewel of this year’s biennale— especially in the context of the Korean Pavilion, the last national pavilion erected in Giardini that celebrates its tenth participation in the art world’s Olympics.

To give greater context to Kimsooja’s oeuvre: it is rare to discuss the art of Kimsooja without mentioning terms like the artist’s female body, the diasporic identity and global itinerancy. The South Korean-born artist began her overseas career in the mid-1980s, after her study abroad at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In the 1990s, she then quickly joined the circuit of contemporary artists whose frequent traveling coincided with the international art bienniales and galleries in metropolitan cities. Her most celebrated work comprises a range of adaptation and appropriation of bottari (bundles enveloped with silk clothes) and yibul (quilt-like bed covers), which the artist designates under the metaphors of sewing, wrapping, and, more specifically, the Korean cultural tradition embodied in the artist’s self. While weaving yibul with her mother back in 1983, as Kimsooja famously accounts, she rediscovered clothes and needles as her artistic medium, eventually leading her to abandon the canvas and brush. The vibrant silks in Kimsooja’s bottari and yibul series therefore conjure a culturally gendered aura, if not the mystified persona of the artist, wherever the works are installed, either in white cubes (P.S.1, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, etc.) or in site-specific spaces (a public park in Gwangju, the Greenlawn Cemetery in Brooklyn, etc.). In more recent years, she began to perform her pieces standing immobile on the bustling streets of Tokyo, Cairo, Lagos, New York, Shanghai and more, with her back turned away from the viewers. The subject of her videos, titled A Needle Woman (1999 – 2001; 2005), is the diverse portraits and varied reactions of passers-by, of whom the artist, like a ‘needle’, weaves in and out. Here, a question should be raised.

If Bottari and the act of weaving and wrapping have long functioned as the central theme for the artist—and there is no silk, bundles, or artist’s image posed as a Korean woman in ‘To Breathe: Bottari’ at this year’s Korean Pavilion—how then does this work fit or challenge Kimsooja’s path? Before delving into this question further, I would address the pavilion’s dissonant relationship to the rest of the Biennale. This year’s main exhibition, entitled ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’, is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, which takes inspiration from a 1955 architectural model of the same title. Built by Marino Auriti, an Italian American who dreamt of an imaginary museum housing all the knowledge of the world, the model was of course never realised in real life. The leap of utopian fantasy and artistic obsession, however, are more than alive in Gioni’s own encyclopedia of dynamic contemporary art. Perhaps too similar to what Gioni showcased at the 2010 Gwangju Biennale, this year’s main exhibition in Venice is packed with microcosms constructed by creative, at times erratic, artistic minds. Indeed, the reproduction of portraits or self-images is one significant thread, as seen from the fact that Gioni shared his curatorial authorship with only one other person—Cindy Sherman, who is another inspiration for the curator and to whom he ‘outsourced’ the curation of a room in Arsenale. Sherman’s gallery is, surprisingly, focused on the staged nature of portraits, photographs, and sculptures, exposing the lack of an innate quality in one’s identity. A picture is a picture, even though it is the only means through which to express the self. Likewise, art is not a transparent reflection of the world, but is contingent with the world around us, and is simultaneously world-making.

Unlike any other worlds imagined in Venice—for example, the Golden Lion winner Edson Chagas’s Angolan Pavilion, which featured still-life photographs as stacks of posters that visitors can collect in a provided folder to make his/her own collection of Angolan images, or Stefanos Tsivopoulos’s Greek Pavilion with a three-channel video about the world of alternative currency— the world proposed by Kimsooja for the Korean Pavilion seems empty. It is at least empty of images created by the artist for the viewer to see. What welcomes the visitors at the Korean Pavilion is the double-bound set of light and darkness, transparency and opacity, which calls for a heightened bodily experience. In the room of light, the viewers confront the images of themselves on intermittently installed planes of mirror on existing walls. Some walls refract the self-images because they are of a half-transparent, half-reflective surface that lets the light from outside.

Considering Kimsooja’s interests in the female body and self-image, her works like A Needle Woman might strike lines of affiliation with Cindy Sherman’s Film Stills. However, the current installation of the light-filled room with no built-in portraits signifies Kimsooja’s break away from the play on representations and appropriation that have earned her international recognition. It must also be recognised that this trajectory began in 2006, when she enveloped the Crystal Palace at the Reina Sofia with diffraction grating film sheets. Here, Bottari as a metaphor had lost its cultural root in Korean women’s domestic labor and their mobility forced by the country’s rapid modernization; it has become a mere gesture that wraps things, at times even a building. If Bottari previously allegorized the artist’s body, it has now become a bundle as an empty signifier, to which the viewers as breathing bodies enter and look into the self-images. Or as Lacan would say, they would face the images of not-me, the mis-recognized self (méconnaissance).

That is the magical irony of Kimsooja’s Korean Pavilion. What no longer lingers in the exhibition are the deep-seated metaphors of ‘Koreanness’ based on the artist’s personal history—or to be more precise, pre modern Korean traditions revived as contemporary art tropes which the artist articulated alongside her own transcultural trajectory. The visual and symbolic disappearance of the Korean Pavilion is telling this year, especially when the German and French ones controversially swapped galleries with each other in order to critique the embraced nationalism in the pavilion system at Venice. The magical disappearance of the Korean Pavilion can be said to demonstrate a more compelling aesthetic impact than the Franco-German scandal.

There is another story to be told about the aptness of Kimsooja’s Bottari for this year’s Korean Pavilion. One has to remember that such a clever visual trick owes much to the fact that the pavilion is essentially built with glass and steel—that is, light materials, compared to the concrete or limestone of any other national pavilion. When selected as this year’s commissioner, Seungduk Kim sought to intervene in the pavilion’s architectural location and history. She was well aware that in 1993, when Nam June Paik shared the Golden Lion award with Hans Haacke, Paik argued with impassioned force for the construction of a national pavilion for Korea. Biennale’s first response to this request was that it was ‘impossible’, as Yongwoo Lee, who collaborated with Paik during the historical moment, accounts in his essay included in the catalogue. The last card that Paik played, and which eventually won South Korea the current site, was, to the surprise of many people today, none other than North Korea. Paik argued that the pavilion would serve both Koreas on cultural terms, at a time when the post-Berlin Wall era had just begun and many conjectured an optimistic future for the divided peninsula. In exchange for the relatively central location of the pavilion, the city of Venice barred the building from obstructing the view onto the Grand Canal located right behind it —hence the current shape and material of the pavilion.

Of course not a single North Korean artist has ever exhibited in the Korean Pavilion, which is why the mirror play in ‘To Breathe: Bottari’ is tragically beautiful and poignant. It pays homage to the misrecognized political motivation back in 1993, while making self-as-other portraits emerge within the very empty signifier of peace and hope. Moreover, the portraits of visitors are not only replicated through mirror reflection but also fractured and multiplied into numerous fragments via the aluminum sheets laid on the floor. As seen in the picture of the Korean Pavilion, the exhibition hall is less a linear mise-en-abÎme than a kaleidoscopic image composed by a dozen visitors whose dismembered images, like tapered needles, effusively crowd the gigantic Bottari. For such a striking visual metaphor to arise in the Korean Pavilion, the personal allegories of the artistic self had to be minimized. The sound installation of the artist’s breathing titled The Weaving Factory (2004 – 2013) is effectively over to the blackout that the artist experienced in New York during Hurricane

Sandy takes on a different epistemological spin in the context of the Korean Pavilion. Isn’t the northern half of the peninsula the darkest part of the world, as apparent in the infamous satellite photograph of Northeast Asia? It is quite a coincidence that Minsuk Cho, the Korean commissioner for next year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, announced that his show would feature commentaries on North Korean architecture as well as South Korean. Such a curatorial direction might evince the reality that the marquee ‘COREA’ inscribed on the pavilion’s facade does not indicate either the South or the North. A more convincing tack, however, is that the South Korean arts can only exist because of the presence of Northern society and culture, and vice versa. The binary of light and darkness never promises the absolute but is always already defined in relative terms. In this sense, the political, social, and cultural path-taking of North Korea in the post-Communist era serves not as a catastrophic exception but as an unavoidable symptom of the unidirectional neoliberal march taken by the rest of the world, as if the anomaly of ‘To Breathe: Bottari’ is symptomatic of the Venice Biennale and the Korean Pavilion.