In 2017, three cities were selected for the Culture City of East Asia exchange project: Kyoto in Japan, Daegu in Korea, and Changsha in China. At the time, I served as artistic director for Japan. An exhibition entitled Asia Corridor was held with Kyoto’s Nijo Castle as its main venue, and Kimsooja was one of the central artists. Viewed in retrospect, her work at the time could be seen as a precursor to her Seoul solo exhibition Kimsooja, To Breathe — Sunhyewon. It involved laying down mirrored panels in the hall of the castle’s royal palace (which is designated as an Important Cultural Property) in Japan and installing mirrorlike polished stainless steel screens on top.

Similarly, the central work in Kimsooja, To Breathe — Sunhyewon is a large-scale installation that is integrated with the architecture. Mirrored panels have been placed all over the floors of a new wooden structure built in the traditional Korean style. As the viewer steps onto them and walks around, their gaze shifts up and down. The high ceiling appears inverted on the floor, its thick rafters in view. Treading on the image evokes the curious sense of floating in midair. Kimsooja has created a site-specific mechanism that provides a beautiful and thrilling experience, blurring boundaries as it upends our binary perceptions of real and mirror image, the visual and physical experience of a space, the subject and object of perception, and traditional modernity.

In this sense, the inclusion of the word “breathe” in the installation’s title is intriguing. The verb “breathe” does not posit an oppositional relationship between the space and us, but neither does it equate them. Instead, it introduces a state of “correspondence” between them.
One of Kimsooja’s well-known video performances is entitled A Needle Woman (1999–2001). In it, she stands alone and unmoving in the middle of busy streets in various cities. There is no message or emotion—only a fixed camera that films her from behind for long periods. As countless people pass by to her left and right, she simply stands there, a complete other. The “needle woman” is a needle fixed vertically into an everyday landscape of urbanites. A Needle Woman appears before us as a silent critique of contemporary society, in the sense that it conveys no message, that the figure exists as an emotionally other separate from her surroundings, and that she is a woman (it should not be overlooked that “needle woman” is originally understood to mean a woman who sews).

As the people move about horizontally, the unmoving “needle woman” stands perfectly straight among them. Considering my own perspective, I will offer my interpretation of how we should interpret the “verticality” that appears in Kimsooja’s repeated performances.
Yoshimoto Takaaki (1924–2012) is well known as a philosopher, but he was also a poet who confronted post–World War II society with a staunchly critical mindset. His poem “A Greeting to a Small Crowd” (1952) contains a very powerful line that reads, “If I fall down, a directness falls as well.”

The “directness” referred to here may be seen as the directness of a poet who did not allow himself to be swept away by the currents of his times—a firm mental state of opposition to repressive institutions and social irrationality. The lines before the one in question read, “I go forward / into the midst of innumerable enemies” and “My solitude I can withstand almost to the extreme.” The “directness” of someone who does not fall even in the midst of enemies and the extremes of solitude may have represented the self-respect of someone carrying an uncompromised sense of mission as a poet.
Perhaps some parallel can be drawn between Yoshimoto’s directness and the rigid and unmoving stance of the needle woman. Her vertical image—seen from behind as an “other” in a horizontal flow of people—may be an expression of the artist’s staunch will not to fall or succumb to the currents of society.

How does “verticality” manifest in the exhibition Kimsooja, To Breathe — Sunhyewon? The work requires the viewer to go inside the space itself, and in that sense, it is different in nature from A Needle Woman. We walk up over a mirrored surface, representing the boundary between the real and mirror images. The identical landscapes that appear above and before include the viewer as well, and the border between the two images obviously forms a visual symmetry. While ordinary gallery exhibitions unfold horizontally as the viewer passes through them, the spatial experience here can also be described as vertical in the sense that the viewer is mainly shifting their gaze up and down. The fact that Kimsooja applies her distinctive conceptual approach to add the “fiction” of the mirrored floor to a traditional Korean space may further signify a form of vertical intervention in a historical space.
Like this installation, the artist’s previous works—at Kyoto’s Nijo Castle or at the Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection, where she mirrored the floors of a historical structure renovated by Ando Tadao (b. 1941)—illustrate beautiful and thrilling devices in which she uses vertical intervention with mirrors to transform historic spaces into present-tense experiences.

Deductive Object – Bottari (2023), a work of white porcelain produced in Meissen, Germany, boasts a spherical shape modeled on the Moon Jar, a symbol of Joseon-era culture. The perfect sphere is formed by joining the edges of two hemispheres, and it may be seen as symbolizing a state in which the tension between the horizontal and vertical—or the boundary between traditional and modern—has been elegantly resolved or rejected.

Also presented in the latest exhibition are examples of the bottari (bundle) work that served as a starting point for Kimsooja’s career and remains the same to this day. Wrapping cloths (bedcovers in Kimsooja’s case) are closely connected to Korea’s traditional culture. Made to wrap and carry various objects; they have been used for gifts and carried the auspicious sense of wishing for blessings. For the artist, they represent memories of growing up and metaphors for travel and movement, as well as media expressing a critical perspective relating to gender. Yet even as they encompass these aspects, the cloths capture our gaze with their brilliant colors and rich, warm sentiments.

And so it is. With the determination of a “needle woman” confronting our contemporary moment, with a flexible gaze that captures history in new ways, with a depth of thought, and with the gentle yet profound correspondence of breathing, Kimsooja remains one of our most important artists.