The canal banks Oude Vest and Oude Singel in front of Museum De Lakenhal are linked together by white steel arches, looping at even angles over the water, one after the other. At night they are illuminated, creating circles with their reflections. From the air, the arches appear to stitch the two banks together. The Lucas van Leyden Fund commissioned this work from Kimsooja, who gave it the title To Breathe – Leiden.

The city curatorium at the Lucas van Leyden Fund commissioned a number of artworks between 2019 and 2022 for public spaces in Leiden. The aim was to use visual art to reinforce Leiden’s identity as a city of art and science, for both residents and visitors. An important reason for inviting Kimsooja was the humanistic stance that is embedded in her work, characterising the way she approaches the world as an artist. This is expressed in the themes that recur in her work: migration, and individual and national identity. These important subjects dovetail perfectly with Leiden’s identity as an international university city where the humanities and natural sciences are strongly represented. Among the subjects Kimsooja highlights in her work are the ways in which individuals relate to their social environment and how our
consciousness is affected by changes in the physical, social and cultural world around us. These topics also relate to the scientific disciplines practised at Leiden University.

Kimsooja uses a minimal, or rather subtle, visual language. She also describes her practice as ‘the art of non-making’. With limited interventions, she creates sculptures, performances, films, photographs and spatial installations that accentuate distinctive features of social, cultural or physical environments. To Breathe is an umbrella title for a series of site-specific works in which light is given a leading role as an architectural element. Kimsooja uses light to breathe life into spaces. To Breathe – Leiden is hence one work in an ongoing series. Here, as in much of her other work, she manages to give poetic expression to the specific characteristics of the location, creating layers of meaning using a limited arsenal of materials. In To Breathe – Leiden, Kimsooja links local history to buildings’ current uses and imaginatively brings together the worlds of art and science.

To Breathe – Leiden is located in front of De Lakenhal. For centuries, Leiden was a prominent centre of textile production and this former cloth hall was an important hub in the city’s textile industry. The arches of the work allude to this history, the circles they form with their reflections recalling the spinning wheels that were used to spin yarn from wool. Today, de Lakenhal is the city’s museum for visual arts, history and applied arts. Across the water is Museum Boerhave, the museum of science and medicine. As well as referring to the wool industry’s spinning wheels, the arches (or threads) in To Breathe – Leiden also symbolically connect science (Museum Boerhave) on one side and culture (Museum De Lakenhal) on the other.

The spatial installation contains layers of meaning that refer to the environment in which it is located. At the same time, the physical presence of the installation, with its rhythmic succession of slanting white arches, naturally evokes sensations of its own, especially when illuminated at night. From the front, the white arches then appear to loop, back and forth, in and out of the water, endlessly echoing the rhythm of breath. To Breathe – Leiden is thus an installation that reflects viewers back on themselves, like an
instrument for self-reflection and awareness.