Sunhyewon’s way of greeting visitors is orderly but circumspect. To reach the space beyond the well-carved stone wall, we have to ascend a stone staircase with several bends. But as if to deliberately prolong the journey, the thin steps change directions several times, deferring the moment of our arrival. Following along the small stone path, we gradually feel the settling of whatever frenetic energy we may have brought in from outside, as we await the landscape that has yet to present itself before us.

The wide-open space that we encounter presents us with the sprawl of a well-tended lawn. The green grass appears high up in our view, and just as we are finally sensing it underfoot, we find ourselves facing three commanding hanok structures positioned in a “C” shape: Gyeonheung-gak, Harin-dang, and Dongyeo-ru. The visually imposing structures are located high up on nuhaju (supporting columns), offering a view over the landscape. To reach them, we have to climb another steep staircase. In this way, we prepare ourselves to enter a different dimension of time and space, experiencing various physical and sensory changes as we go from a closed space to an open one and from a low setting to up high.

As the doors open to Gyeonheung-gak—which serves as a kind of main building for Sunhyewon—we find ourselves briefly hesitating before the different world that presents itself. We behold an immersive space, a world where the high ceiling connects as one with the depth below the floor, a setting where we might float in midair with no surface underneath our feet. We ask ourselves if this is what it might look like if we could fully envision the entire world with our eyes. The blithely repeating high columns and queen posts, the crossbeams and purlins—all these elements form the many grids that make up a world, establishing internal laws that govern it firmly. The artist who more than doubled the structure’s presence erases her own presence, quietly taking a step back behind the mirror. Kimsooja does not show any color, form, or movement here—she merely breathes profound life into the space so that it reveals its own presence.

Kimsooja is an artist who has made an indelible impression with her needle and bottari (bundle work). For more than four decades since the mid-1980s, she has consistently existed as an artist in the present tense. This could be seen as quite exceptional, given the way that the acute moments we describe as “contemporary” are constantly shifting and the artists’ cycles of life and creation evolve with the currents of their times. Because Kimsooja’s insights into art emerge from a highly personal and experiential place, her work harbors a universal quality that is unbounded by time within its characteristic genuineness. It is like an eye that is open toward the ultimate from the very outset. In that respect, her work is not so much evolving as transforming and expanding, providing answers to innumerable discourses of the moment.

Her work is also present-tense in the sense that it is constantly being redefined within the different perspectives of critics and curators with different interests and views. Many are aware that a 1983 “incident” related to sewing created an opportunity for the artist to transcend the two-dimensionality of painting, establishing an artistic outlet at a time when many were discussing the “end of painting.” The moment the needle passed between the warp and weft threads, fixed ideas about the painted surface opened up, and the two-dimensional canvas became a cloth with four corners. There was the soft and rounded sculpture that bound it, the painted colors conveying the sense of Korea’s traditional obangsaek spectrum, and a “meta-painting” in black that condensed and absorbed all color. Kimsooja’s work has drawn notice as a tenacious aesthetic experiment to explore what artistic conditions and possibilities have presented themselves since the era of modernism.

The same incident also inscribed itself as a highly personal memory and physical experience. The artist’s approach of embracing the marks and scents of life in blankets and old clothes can be traced to her everyday experience of sewing such covers with her mother and to her experience of keeping the complete wardrobe of traditional hanbok clothing left behind by her late grandmother. Pieces of fabric associated with every part of human life—from birth to romance, rest, illness, and death—relate necessarily to discourses on the body, in that they are in direct contact with the skin. This explains the performativity that exists as a cornerstone in Kimsooja’s work. The old garments wrapped in bundles are approached as metaphors for life and death, evoking the presence of the collective and community beyond the realm of personal experience.

Bundles also offer one of the simplest means of traveling. In this sense, they reflect Kimsooja’s childhood experience of frequently relocating with her soldier father, along with her quasi-nomadic lifestyle since becoming an artist. They vividly illustrate contemporary issues of migration and refuge, as people are forced to the periphery by full-scale economic globalization, war, and natural disaster. The culture of sewing naturally conjures associations with women’s labor, and the traditional, folk-based motifs of the covers evoke the cultural identities of the periphery and minority groups.

The social, cultural, and political implications of sewing and bundles represent urgent issues posed by our contemporary climate, and it is special indeed that such a wide spectrum of discourse can be addressed by the work of a single artist. This critical perspective is visible in Kimsooja’s gaze of compassion and mourning toward frail, marginalized lives throughout the world. But she does not simply raise these issues—she consistently explores the potential for healing through solidarity. This is the central spirit of continuity and all-inclusiveness in the concepts of bundles and unseen sewing. The acts of passing a needle and wrapping a bundle are not simply matters of weaving and connecting different physical fragments. They expand into acts of linking people with other people, individuals with society, and time with space.

The process of connection and inclusion necessarily expands the scope. This is evident in the shift from object to space, from physical to spiritual, and from visible to invisible. The artist’s actions increasingly approach the realm of non-action, while her ego has tended toward integration with the larger world. She was already placing little importance on her own individuality when she posited herself as an immaterial medium of the world’s reality in her defining early video performance series A Needle Woman (1999–2001), where her body became a walking “needle.” In subsequent works like A Laundry Woman – Yamuna River (2000), A Beggar Woman (2000–2001), and A Homeless Woman (2000–2001), she attempted to present herself with the lowest profile among the world’s masses or as an anonymous figure seen from behind. In 2003, she offered a written explanation for her artistic name “Kimsooja,” which appears as one word with no distinction between surname and given name. She said that she did not want it to reveal “gender, marital status, or sociopolitical, cultural, or geographic identity.” In effect, she was saying that when one embraces the world while weaving relationships with others, the individual subject can be reduced to the point of a needle. In that sense, it might seem natural that she would adopt the mirror as a medium in work meant to embrace others and illuminate the world—while effacing herself to the point of transparency.

A mirror is simply a two-dimensional physical device with a reflecting surface. Yet its near-magical ability to visually replicate an object has made it the subject of ongoing contemplation in philosophy and art history. Many contemporary artists have worked with mirrors. Examples include Joan Jonas, who has deconstructed faith in representation and self-identification by using fragmented mirrors to disrupt visual processing; Michelangelo Pistoletto, who has illustrated the gap between image and reality through encounters between viewers and figures portrayed on mirrors; Anish Kapoor, who uses concave mirrors to offer a complete condensed portrait of the world in an inverted, distorted image; and Yayoi Kusama, whose work has explored the infinite repetition and hallucinatory spaces of mirrors. Most artists have approached the mirror as both a tool for self-reflection and a surveillance device that internalizes the gazes of others—using it as a device to pose questions about the objectivity of the reflected image and reality. Crucially, the mirrors in their works have still appeared as aesthetic materials that adhere to the forms of painting or sculpture.

In contrast, Kimsooja’s approach to mirrors is quite neutral. In her work, the mirror does not so much pose questions about perception and representation as it reflects the image without distortion as a neutral surface. It is a space that does not attempt to represent or latch onto the world—one that even allows things to disappear. Instead of serving to replicate or imitate, it appears as a phenomenological field where seeing and being seen permeate each other. With the title A Mirror Woman, the artist clearly shows the ontological entanglement that exists among her own empty subjectivity, the mirror medium, and the act of reflecting the world.

Kimsooja first introduced mirrors to her work with the installation d'Apertutto, or Bottari Truck in Exile at the 1999 Venice Biennale. This unconventional work involved covering the last wall of the Arsenale gallery’s corridor with a mirror and positioning across from it a 2.5-ton truck loaded with bundles. It was as though the mirror created a large outlet for the wall that had been obstructed by the truck, forming an opening in the lengthy corridor. Her work was dedicated to refugees from Kosovo, who had been victimized in the Yugoslavian civil war around that time. It offered the hope of escaping through the mirror into a different world from the real one.

Kimsooja’s work does not address the questions that have traditionally been associated with mirrors, namely ones having to do with the fictional or virtual nature of their representation. The artist’s interest lies in the potential for expansion as new spaces where the new relationships and presences formed through reflection can linger. A Mirror Woman: The Ground of Nowhere, which was presented in Honolulu in 2003, shared a message of coexistence and healing as it looked back on a hundred-year history of Korean immigration to Hawai’i. It connected a cylinder of cotton curtain measuring nearly 10 meters in height with the base of a mirror 57 inches in diameter and a skylight 21 inches across. The mirror base was a small space, measuring less than 3.3 square meters—yet here it became a place of healing and purification. The pure, warm fabric enveloped a history of grueling, lonely labor like the blanket wrapped around a newborn. As viewers lay on the mirrored floor and looked up at the circle of sky, they could dream of a space of affirmation beyond reality. The round mirror pointed at the sky allowed them to imagine cosmic elements like the sun and moon. This aspect would carry over into A Mirror Woman: The Sun & The Moon (2008), sparking the artist’s interest in the principles of interdependence and cycling in nature.

Since 2006, the artist has worked on the series To Breathe, in which she experiments with ways of architecturally representing the concepts associated with the bundle and mirror—namely inclusion and expansion—and shows how such spaces can harbor the breath of life. In her solo exhibition To Breathe: A Mirror Woman (2006) at the Museo Reina Sofia’s Palacio de Cristal and later works at the Venice Biennale’s Korean Pavilion (2013) and Punta della Dogana (2023), she began wrapping buildings in diffraction film, which could be described as a form of “woven light.” The work itself was transparent, yet the refraction of light and reflections of mirrors filled the space with a rainbow of color, as the space became a “bundle” cloaked in weavings in the obangsaek spectrum. The kaleidoscopic waves of color suffused the setting with an energy of inhalations and exhalations. Inside the space, the viewer had the experience of being fully enveloped in a living, breathing bundle of light.

In To Breathe – Sunhyewon (2025), it was not through sensory disruptions like these that the artist experimented with the breaths of life. Instead, she connected the creator, structure, and artist through the use of lucid mirrors alone. As in her work To Breathe – Constellation (2024), the central and sole medium behind the breathing in her work was the mirror. The contrasts and harmonies between the two works are such that they could be viewed as a perfect pairing. The comparisons are observable as much in the spatial contrast of the circle and cube as in the models for empathy and abstraction, the contrasts of surface and structure, and the symbolism of bundles and sewing.

The Bourse de Commerce, which was built in France in the 19th century in the domed structure tradition, was redefined by Ando Tadao into an empty circular hole measuring 29 meters across and nine meters in height. Kimsooja drew inspiration from the combination of upper and lower hemispheres formed when a mirror was placed beside her moon jar work Deductive Object – Bottari. By positioning a mirror on the floor at the center of the hemisphere, she completed the spherical shape of To Breathe – Constellation. The ceiling showed wall paintings of exotic colonized lands, reflecting the expansionism of France’s Third Republic. Their mirrored images underfoot recall the fleeting nature of phenomena, and the fact that towering things are fated to fall. To Breathe – Constellation may be seen as an architectural bottari, wrapping historical time and space into a single mass with life.

Drawing on the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin’s categories of “abstraction” and “empathy,” we may view To Breathe – Constellation as representing empathy in terms of the sensory, typological level of the real world. In contrast, To Breathe – Sunhyewon quietly embodies the archetypal realm of abstract ideas with its unadorned grids. The columns and beams that appear in the tower—designed by architect Kim Bong Ryol as a multistory structure measuring 7.2 meters in height, unusually for a hanok building—are more than double the size of the ones that appear in a single-story hanok. This is meant to create a chain of grids, reestablishing the same double height and depth when reflected in the floor’s mirrors.

The intersecting vertical and horizontal lines of the grids create a balance of forces through the contrasts in opposing energy. They embody the unseen internal structures behind the surface-level world. The conflicting energies of the horizontal and vertical may be separated along binary lines: male and female, human beings and nature, light and darkness, spiritual and material, life and death, inhalation and exhalation, warp and weft threads. Yet the intersection of opposing elements emphasizes the potential for creation and unlimited movement. Kimsooja’s interest in cross structures and intersecting warp and weft threads on the canvas dates back many years; indeed, she wrote a master’s thesis that explored the significance and universality of crosses in contemporary art. In that sense, the grid structure of Sunhyewon’s Gyeonheung-gak may have seemed particularly special to her.

The decision to place mirrors on the floor without adding any other devices to the structure may have been made because the repeated chain of the grid aligned perfectly with the intent of what the artist was weaving. It was a different way of focusing on a building’s structure from the treating of surfaces with diffraction film bearing grid-like scratches. The higher the columns rise, the deeper the abyss appears where the viewer’s feet meet the mirror. Instead of separating around the mirror, the spaces above and below the ground overlap and become one. The viewer walks on a horizontal surface yet experiences verticality. The function is similar to that of a needle stitching together two spaces. Describing her mirror work as “vertical bottari,” Kimsooja has said, “I use mirrors to make invisible bundles. Within those bundles, sky becomes earth, and the viewer becomes the needle weaving the world.” What we witness at Sunhyewon is an astonishing scene of ontological reduction, where the artificial order (architecture) transforms into an invisible bundle.