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.

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.

Rubber, Jute, and Natural Cotton - Used Artist's Yogamat
182.9 x 60.9 cm
Unique

Digital Embroidery on Satin, abstract from The Weaving Factory(2004) sound performance by the artist,
61.4 x 179.5 x 7 cm
Unique