Desert X 2025 Coachella Valley, Desert Hot Springs, CA
March 8 - May 11 2025
For more information click HERE.


Our cultures, lifestyles, rituals, and belief systems may differ, but we are all connected by the air we breathe, the planet’s circular rotations, and the cycles of life and death that it sustains. This interconnectedness runs through a diverse body of Kimsooja’s work that includes sculpture, painting, film, performance, and installation.


In her latest installation, To Breathe – Coachella Valley, Kimsooja integrates various ideas from her broader practice. The glass structure serves to define a performance space, inviting the audience to interact with the essential elements of the desert: the texture of sand underfoot, the air we breathe, and the light around us. Drawing inspiration from bottaris, the fabric-encased bundles of belongings prominent in her work and in Korean culture, Kimsooja describes this installation as a “bottari of light.” By wrapping the glass surface in a unique optical film, she transforms the physical architecture into a dynamic spectrum of light and color. “This diffraction film acts as a transparent textile, featuring thousands of vertical and horizontal scratch lines akin to warp and weft, and envelops the architecture in light.”


Mirrors have also played a significant role in her exploration of light’s ephemerality. To Breathe – Coachella Valley reflects another work located in the desert of AlUla, Saudi Arabia. Connected by the air that sustains us, this iteration not only references its counterpart nearly 8,000 miles away but also acknowledges the historical origins of the Light and Space movement on the U.S. West Coast. With its ever-changing approach based on color spectrum theory from Chinese Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, To Breathe – Coachella Valley enriches these traditions by incorporating the female perspective of East Asia. The result is an experience that is both ephemeral and profound.


Generous support is provided by Ed Campanaro and Alan Weisberg, Ron Florance, Marcy and Harry Harczak, the Posner Foundation, Janelle Reiring, Melissa and John Russo, Roswitha Smale, and Richard H. Wood.

The Meta-Painting series explores the fundamental principles of painting and its origins. It began in 2020 at the Wanås Konst Sculpture Park in Sweden, where Kimsooja produced linen spun from flax that she had planted, cultivated, and harvested. It was later woven into a canvas surface as a form of painting that need not be painted. The project reconstructs painting as a life-generating cycle, and the unpainted canvas investigates the conceptual relationship between painting, agriculture, and textiles.


The black Meta-Paintings conceptualize and bring to reality the absence of light and surface. They take form as both a flat and a wrapped surface, continuing the formalistic trajectory of Kimsooja’s folded and unfolded Bottari. While the depth of black color absorbs nearly all light and shadow, its surface resists our discernment. The piece points toward painting as a place of not knowing, a site of vulnerability, and a moment of beginning.


As a counterpart to the Meta-Painting series, To Breathe is a site-specific installation that prismatically diffracts natural sunlight into radiating spectral bands, or concentric double-axis brushstrokes of vertical and horizontal colors. The displacement of lightwaves guides the eyes back and forth across the threshold of architecture, effectively turning the act of gazing into a form of weaving the surface.

In the Presence of Absence, Desert X AlUla 2024, Alula, Saudi Arabia
9 Feb 2024 to 23 March 2024
For more information click HERE.


To Breathe – AlUla encapsulates Kimsooja’s contemplation of the original geographical forms and elements that shaped the region’s distinct desert and volcanic landscape. The core natural elements that took shape within this topography – from cracks in the volcanic stones and monumental sandstone mountains, to the delicate leaves of grass that, with the help of the wind, brush circular forms onto the soil – draw life through a phenomenon of contraction and expansion. As the artist explains, “it is nature’s breathing that transforms the earth’s surface across a deep arc of time.” The life cycle of the Earth in space and time has been Kimsooja’s inspiration and leaves a strong impact on her artistic vision.


The movement of wind and the path of light – which reflects, refracts, and traverses through the spiral paths of To Breathe – AlUla’s glass walls – echo the conceptual and geometrical formation of the desert landscape. Coated with a special film, the glass is a translucent canvas with a microstructure of thousands of vertical and horizontal grooves that function as prisms. Sunlight refracts through this surface into an iridescent color spectrum, casting rainbow-colored shadows and circular brushstrokes onto the sandy earth. Audiences partake in a contemplative performance by walking through and gazing at the shifting light spectrums that render visible the vibrations of colors normally invisible to the naked eyes. With Kimsooja’s words, “it is a walk in and out of a contained yet open spiral path that unfolds an abstract ‘lightscape’ – at once a drawing, a painting, and a sculpture.”

Kimsooja, To Breathe - Archive of Prototype, Axel Vervoordt, Patio Gallery
16 March to 31 August 2024
For more information click HERE.


This exhibition, To Breathe - Archive of Prototype, features two central interventions from Kimsooja's oeuvre: her permanent stained-glass windows in Metz Cathedral (2022), and her fourteen-metre-high steel sculpture in the form of a needle, realised for Cornell University (2014) and on display today in Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Both installations uniquely engage with air and light, with our perspective on the universe, with collective memory, and with traditional and scientific industries such as glassblowing and nanotechnology.


This exhibition is the fifth in collaboration with Axel Vervoordt Gallery, and celebrates Kimsooja's solo exhibitions at De Lakenhal, Leiden and Bourse de Commerce, Paris, and her installation at the exhibition Jef Verheyen - Window on Infinity, KMSKA, Antwerp. Her work is also currently on display in the acclaimed exhibition Unravel at Barbican, London.

To Breathe – Constellation
20 March to 2 September 2024
For more information click HERE


Her installation in the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce is both monumental and ethereal: an immense mirror on the floor that, as one approaches, inverts the architecture and the order of the world with it, the sky opening up in the middle of the building, beneath our feet. Kimsooja is also taking over the 24 display cases in the Passage and the lower level of the museum with works and video installations that address her favourite themes: identity, borders, memory, exile, movement, and weaving.


“I would like to create works that are like water and air, which we cannot possess but which can be shared with everyone”, Kimsooja says. Since the late 70s, her work has asserted itself on the international art scene as an essential, universal experience. After studying painting in Seoul, she distanced herself from all art teachings and practice, embracing everyday gestures such as sewing to explore the issues of identity, involvement, individual and collective memory, and the individual’s place in the world. In the performance in 1997 that made her famous, she spent eleven days travelling across Korea perched atop a lorry loaded with bottaris, the traditional, shimmering Korean fabric bundles used to mark major events in people’s lives, from birth to marriage to death.


As a nomadic artist, a “cosmopolitan anarchist” as she calls herself, Kimsooja metaphorically uses her own body like an anonymous, almost invisible presence whose immobility and verticality become a kind of needle that threads through the fabric of the world.


The mirror that she has used to cover the floor of the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce plays a similar role to that of the needle or of her own body.

Kimsooja's site-specific installation with diffraction grating film, To Breathe is integrated into the Mairie de Saint-Ouen station's exchange hall(Paris Métro - line 13&14). To Breathe is an immersive installation, using the principle of light diffraction to create a sensory and poetic atmosphere designed to resonate with travelers of all ages. On the glass walls that surround the void of the exchange room overlooking the metro tracks, the rays of light break down into multiple spectrums of color, acting as a three-dimensional painting that redefines the space. Each moment within this installation promises a distinct encounter.


For more information click HERE.

Installation view at Group Exhibition Icônes, Punta della Dogana, Venice, Italy
2 April 2023 - 26 November 2026
For more information about the exhibition, please click HERE.

On Galeries Lafayette’s invitation, Kimsooja illuminates the department store’s magnificent architecture with her light-oriented installation To Breathe. By covering the iconic glass dome in Galeries Lafayette’s Paris Haussmann store with diffraction grating film, Kimsooja transforms the dome’s external surfaces and internal spaces into iridescent landscapes that shift and change throughout the day. For this site-specific installation (the first in Paris on this scale), Kimsooja explores the building’s sensory and meditative qualities by focusing visitors’ attention on light to create an environment conducive to contemplation. Space in between double dome on the 5th floor is exceptionally opened to the public for the installation.


For more information click HERE.

In 2023, Kimsooja captures the underground space of Cisternerne. The audience is invited into an etheral space where light, projected into iridescent color spectra, transforms the former water reservoir into a sacred sea of light. Every year, the Frederiksberg Museums invites an artist to create a site-specific work for the 4,400 square meters of Cisternerne, into which the daylight never reaches, the humidity is close to 100%, the reverberation is of 17 seconds, and the temperature fluctuates between 4 and 16 degrees Celsius. In an extensive installation of light and color, Kimsooja transforms Cisternerne into an ephemeral universe, where the light radiates like brushstrokes on transparent canvases and breaks the darkness. The work is comprised of diffraction grating film that is mounted on transparent panels, which altogether let light pass through a microscopic surface of horizontal and vertical prisms. Rays of light split into vibrant colors that dynamically weave in and out of the subterranean colonnades.


For more information click HERE.

The workshop Kimsooja conceived for Paper Tube Studio originates in her previous body of work, notably the Bottari. It is a “life sculpture”. This surface is used to wrap, or internalize the memory of self and others through the act of making a single knot. It is a work that is at once a painting, a sculpture, and action. In this context, Deductive Object: (Un)fold offers visitors to participate in making a painting that transforms through the physical and emotional dimensions impressed onto the tactile surface of rice paper in the palms of their hands.


In the participatory workshop Deductive Object: (Un)Fold, she gives visitors the opportunity to create a picture that evolves over time according to the physical and emotional experience of the imprint of rice paper in the palm of the hand. Visitors will be invited to freely fold and unfold sheets of rice paper by rolling them between their hands,
pressing the material to form balls in a shared meditative activity. The balls are then placed on long shelves, on the floor or hung from small pegs as in a laundry. Folded then
unfolded, the paper balls will collectively form compositions that are constantly metamorphosing, gradually occupying the space according to the actions of visitors.


With the participation of the Korean Cultural Centre

As the first artist to exhibit at Meridiano, Kimsooja is conscious of the gallery’s name, which originates from meridian — a circular line connecting the north and south poles of the earth at the shortest vertical distance — as well as the exhibition space’s architectural elements, which are exposed to the intense direct sunlight along Oaxaca’s Pacific Coast. Jaoseon’s initiates a performance that places the verticality of the body at the moment when the light is transformed into a geometric structure within the gallery.


For more information, click HERE.

Kimsooja, To Breathe – Zurich, Galerie Tschudi, Zürich, Switzerland
21 January to 11 March 2023
For more information click HERE.


With her installation To Breathe – Zurich Kimsooja inscribes her work in the architecture of Galerie Tschudi. She utilizes the architectural surfaces of the space as the material support for her ‘painting’. All the windows facing the street have been covered in light-diffraction grating film: “This particular film has thousands of vertical and horizontal lines in every inch. It has a woven structure and functions like a prism, creating iridescent light when light passes through it.” (Kimsooja in conversation with Hou Hanru, 2017). The artist also tiled the floor of the gallery with mirror panels. These reflect the ceiling of the space downwards and create the illusion of a dizzying depth. The floor seems almost to dissolve: it appears like a liquid surface, in which the viewers are simultaneously reflected on an unfamiliar vertical axis. The space is otherwise empty – and yet, it is full.

The diamond shapes also have a Buddhist connotation, in the sense of seeking self-completion. In Patio Gallery's small exhibition room are three additional works titled Meta-Painting. The paintings dynamically encapsulate natural light across the visible spectrum by refracting different wavelengths of light through specific undulation of molecular structure. What results is an iridescent material fabric, woven in light. Kimsooja first used nanopolymer in 2014 for the work "A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir". In close collaboration with Ulrich Wiesner, nanomaterials engineer and chemist at Cornell University, Stephanie Owens, curator, and architect Jaeho Chong, the artist created a 14-meter-high needle-shaped nanopolymer steel structure. With a mirrored floor, the environment within the sculpture is remarkable as its space appears simultaneously to extend deep into the earth and to reach high into the sky.


The use of intricate, nano-scale materials demonstrates the reflective characteristics of natural sunlight. The structure's grid-like, sleek, volumetric spine is fleshed out with acrylic panels to form a crystalline pavilion that is transparent to direct view. At a raking light, each of the panels, which have been individually treated with an iridescent nanopolymer, transforms the transparent pavilion into a radiant spectrum with colour as the polymer refracts various wavelengths of natural light dependent on the angle from which it is viewed. Like iridescence that occurs in nature on the wings of butterflies or shells of beetles, the colour of the pavilion is physically interactive, where the blue, red, orange, pink, yellow, green, violet, and other spectral colours appear as a radiant glitch in the fabric of reality. These colours were expressed by using the refraction of light itself in the molecular structure rather than by pigments.


Materialising the shapes, colours, and effects of nature's beauty, Kimsooja considers the earth as a memory. So, too, do the works exhibited in To Breathe - Archive of Prototype, connecting the elusive realms of science and technology with artistic, cultural, and philosophical components from global life.

Making Worlds, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
For more information, click HERE


In occasion of Sydney Modern Project's inauguration, Archive of Mind is now on view at Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia. With the artwork, Kimsooja invites visitors to collect a handful of clay, sit at the large work surface, and empty their minds of distraction; to sink into the experience of forming a ball of clay between the hands, rolling and wrapping it into itself like an infinite Bottari. The process transforms simple, everyday actions into moments of meditation and transcendence. As each sphere is completed, it is added to the table, forming an organic arrangement that holds the imprint of each maker. Archive of mind is accompanied by Unfolding Sphere, a subtle soundscape composed of two sounds: the artist gurgling water and clay balls being pressed, rolled and colliding with one another. At some moments it recalls a distant thunderstorm, at others, a burbling stream.


This presentation of Archive of Mind is supported by a grant from the Australia-Korea Foundation, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Purchase with funds provided by the Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation 2018

Consisting of semicircular arches stretched over the canal that get lit delicately in the evening, To Breathe – Leiden symbolically attests to the connection between art and science that is Leiden’s core character. Furthermore, the series of arches across the canal is a metaphor for Kimsooja’s key motif of sewing and weaving, which also historically grounds the city’s textile tradition. The Lucas Art Award was presented by the Lucas van Leyden Fund, responsible for bringing contemporary art in the city. The work was executed by Anything is Possible and supported by Axel Vervoordt Gallery and it is on view for 3 years, until 2025.

The Cathédrale Saint-Étienne in Metz features new stained glass windows, created by Kimsooja. They are installed in the bays of the triforium in the south arm of the transept. The artist offers an abstract work designed to be a gentle experience, centred on colour and the changing light throughout the day and the seasons. The stained glass panes were created in collaboration with the French master glass maker, Pierre-Alain Parot, using a combination of blown glass and dichroic glass.


This public art commission of a permanent piece was initiated by the Ministry of Culture, France. The project, overseen by the Regional Directorate of Cultural Affairs of the Grand Est region, in close liaison and with constant collaboration with the clergy responsible for the cathedral, was designed as a highlight of the celebrations of the eighth centenary of this Gothic structure.

To Breathe (2021) is a site-specific artwork installed in the museum’s rotunda, where diffraction grating film is used to refract sunlight that enters the circular space through its dome-shaped skylight, illuminating a series of window frames that enclose its central cavity. The diffraction grating film allows natural light to constantly transform in tune with the flow of time, changes in weather and movements of the sun throughout the four seasons, enveloping the interior spiral staircase and surrounding walls in prismatic light before reaching ground level, where it casts a circular splash of color. Breathing within the main axis of the museum that connects its four floors of galleries, this light converts the space into a sanctum. Another type of special reflective film that responds to soft light is installed to interact with the rhythm of the window frames along the spiral staircase. This reflective film yields rainbow spectrums and generates unique compositions according to viewers’ movements, resonating with Kimsooja’s ongoing investigation of painting and two-dimensionality. As light passes through the diffraction grating film, which is covered in nano-sized scratches that act as a prism, the interior space is filled with iridescent rays. Such refraction and breathing of the light awaken the audience’s sentiments and thoughts, allowing for both a metaphorical and embodied experience of the artist’s nonmaterial practice of “non-doing, non-making” with light painting. Transposed into light in To Breathe, Kimsooja’s artistic language transcends notions of materiality and delivers the breath of nature unto all beings within its embrace, from the moment the very first life took its first breath until the present, in the same way that light has always unconditionally sheltered and touched countless beings.

Oku-Noto Triennale: To Breathe, Wanzaki Coast, Suzu, Japan
25 February - 13 June 2021


To Breathe: Mirror (2021) consists of a series of mirror panels installed along the oceanfront that reflect the horizon against a mountainous backdrop. Throughout Kimsooja’s oeuvre, mirrors function as a medium for prolonged questioning and investigation of the conditions of painting, as well as an extension of her “needle” concept in which she seeks to patch up divisions of our times and recover the innate value of human beings. Newly presented at the Oku-Noto Triennale, To Breathe: Mirror resonates and breathes with the natural landscape of the Wanisaki coast. The work integrates both water and earth, reflecting the Other in order to negate the sea’s capacity to demarcate territorial borders according to the modern concept of nations and propose a message of mending and embracing both physical and psychological ruptures.

Oku-Noto Triennale: To Breathe, Wanzaki Coast, Suzu, Japan
25 February - 13 June 2021


To Breathe: Suzu (2021) introduces diffraction grating film to the windows of an abandoned house. Nano-sized scratches covering this thin film operate as prisms that filter natural light by refracting the sun's rays to produce small, fantastic rainbow spectrums. Unveiling a new light painting as a spatial intervention within a deserted house that has ceased to serve as a site of shelter and storage for local fishermen, this work constitutes a sincere endeavor to breathe regeneration and healing into the space. Viewers who experience the light painting on the house’s interior, or look through its windows to behold the iridescent trajectories of visible light outside, will feel a profound sense of connection by witnessing the water, forest and sky of this coastal landscape merge into a single artwork. In the spirit of supporting artistic collaboration even during a global pandemic, the 2nd Oku-Noto Triennale runs from September 4 to November 6th, 2021.

Installation at Wanas Konst Art Gallery, Wanas, Sweden
For Wanås Foundation, Sowing Into Painting, Multidimensional Art Project Including Site-specific Installations
Courtesy of Wanås Konst and Kimsooja Studio

Site Specific Installation at Wanas Konst Sculpture Park, Wanas, Sweden
For Wanås Foundation, Sowing Into Painting, Multidimensional Art Project Including Site-specific Installations
Courtesy of Wanås Konst and Kimsooja Studio

Site-specific Installation at Wanas Konst haybarn, Wanas, Sweden
For Wanås Foundation, Sowing Into Painting, Multidimensional Art Project Including Site-specific Installations
Courtesy of Wanås Konst and Kimsooja Studio

Site-specific Project at Wanas Konst, Sweden
Work in Progress with Two Planted Varieties of Flax Seeds (for Flax Seeds Oil and Linen) in Wanås Konst Open Fields
Courtesy of Wanås Konst and Kimsooja Studio
For Wanås Foundation, Sowing Into Painting, Multidimensional Art Project Including Site-specific Installations

Installation at the 1st Asia Society Triennial: We Do Not Dream Alone: Art and creativity under lockdown, Asia Society Museum, New York, USA
For more information, click HERE

Installation view at To Breathe - The Light House, 2020-2021, Boghossian Foundation, Villa Empain, Brussels, Belgium

Installation at Kimsooja: To Breathe, Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Chapel, Wakefield, UK

Single Channel Video
28:18, 5.1 Sound, HD
Edition of 6 plus 1 artist's proof
Commissioned by the City of Poitiers

Installation view at Musée Sainte-Croix, For Traversées / Kimsooja, 13 site-specific installations around the city of Poitiers, Poitiers, France

Installation view at Notre-Dame La Grande, For Traversées / Kimsooja, 13 site-specific installations around the city of Poitiers, Poitiers, France

Installation view at Tour Maubergeon, For Traversées / Kimsooja, 13 site-specific installations around the city of Poitiers, Poitiers, France