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.

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

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.

A Needle Woman – Jaoseon, 2023
Performance
Courtesy of Meridiano and Kimsooja Studio.
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Kimsooja made a series of performances responding to the unique space of Meridiano in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, on the occasion of its inauguration. The word “jaoseon” in the title means meridian in Korean. The artist stands as a symbolic needle and a vertical axis inside Meridiano's architecture defining the geometry of light and shadow under celestial bodies.


김수자는 멕시코 푸에르토 에스콘디도의 메리디아노 공간 개관을 맞아, 그 장소의 고유한 건축적 특성에 반응하는 일련의 퍼포먼스를 선보였다. 제목에 사용된 ‘자오선’은 ‘meridian’을 뜻한다. 작가는 건축 내부에서 상징적 바늘이자 수직적 축으로 서서, 천체의 움직임 아래에서 빛과 그림자가 형성하는 기하학을 규정하는 존재로 자리한다.

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.

Deductive Object, 2023
Argile / Clay
Courtesy Kimsooja Studio et Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Anvers /Hong Kong


This piece was conceived following the participatory performance Archive of Mind, MMCA Hyundai Motors Series 2016. The artist invited visitors to sit around a 19-meter-long elliptical table and form a sphere with a handful of clay before leaving them in place as part of a collective constellation. In Deductive Object series, Kimsooja places her clay balls in found objects and transforms them into vessels of collective memory. This particular piece was made with local clays at Axel Vervoordt Gallery Hong Kong when the artist had a solo show in 2023.
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〈연역적 오브제〉는 참여형 퍼포먼스 〈마음의 기하학〉(MMCA 현대자동차 시리즈, 2016) 이후 구상된 작업이다. 당시 작가는 관람객들을 길이 19미터에 이르는 타원형 테이블에 앉게 한 뒤 그들에게 한 줌의 점토를 손으로 빚어 구체를 만들도록 요청하였고, 이렇게 만들어진 점토 구체들은 자리에 남아 거대한 별자리의 일부로 축적되었다. 〈연역적 오브제〉 연작에서 김수자는 이러한 점토 구체들을 발견된 오브제 안에 배치함으로써 집합적 기억을 담은 하나의 그릇으로 변환시켰다. 본 작품은 2023년 홍콩의 악셀 베르보르트 갤러리에서 열린 개인전 당시, 현지 점토를 사용해 제작된 것이다.

Sewing Into Soil: Invisible Needle, Invisible Thread, 2023
Porcelaine
Courtesy Kimsooja Studio; KEWENIG, Berlin; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin, Staatliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Meissen, Germany
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Deductive Object, 2019
Porcelaine
Courtesy Kimsooja Studio et Manufacture de Sèvres – Cité de la Céramique


In Sewing Into Soil: Invisible Needle, Invisible Thread Kimsooja needles a slab of porcelain as if sewing into a fabric. The needle doubles as a paint brush and shapes an irregular surface that registers the artist’s physical action. Like on a landscape, or a freshly planted field, she associates the act of piercing into the porcelain mass with that of sowing seeds in the earth.
The porcelain balls of Deductive Object form through contrasting forces of the body. When making them, the two palms press into and rotate about a center, a point of gravitational pull, where the earthen matter absorbs the temperature and temperament of the person shaping it. The two works seen side by side draw a field of voids out of spheres, both contained and empty.
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〈흙으로 바느질하기: 보이지 않는 바늘, 보이지 않는 실〉에서 김수자는 도자판을 천을 꿰매듯 바늘로 찌르고 꿰뚫는 행위를 수행한다. 이 바늘은 동시에 붓처럼 기능하며, 작가의 신체적 행위가 고스란히 새겨진 불규칙한 표면을 만들어낸다. 마치 풍경 위에 자국을 남기거나 막 파종을 마친 밭고랑을 형성하듯, 작가는 도자 덩어리를 관통하는 바느질을 땅에 씨앗을 심는 행위와 겹쳐 사유한다.
〈연역적 오브제〉의 도자 구체는 신체의 상반된 힘을 통해 형성된다. 양손은 흙의 중심점을 향해 눌러붙고 회전하며, 그 중력의 중심에서 흙덩어리는 이를 빚는 사람의 체온과 기질을 흡수한다. 나란히 놓인 두 작품은 비어 있으면서도 품고 있는, 공백의 장을 그려낸다.

Deductive Object – Bottari, 2023
Bisque porcelain
Courtesy Kimsooja Studio; KEWENIG, Berlin; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin, Staatliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Meissen, Germany
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Kimsooja began the Deductive Object series in 1990. She stitched and wrapped used pieces of fabric around commonly found domestic objects, such as a window frame, a ladder, and farming tools. The wrapping of used cloth reaffirms the object's structure and its existence.
Here conceptualized as bottari, moon jars are made by putting together top and bottom halves of a sphere, joining two polarities into a singular whole. What was once a lump of clay gains vertical and horizontal breadth, expanding an inner space through continuous orbital movement around its center. Upon full enclosure, the artist opens a small hole at the top using the tip of a wooden needle. The vestigial surface embraces a breath of air contained within, in the form of a wrapped void.
Many of the works in the vitrines explore the link between the body’s traces (hand-shaped ceramics, fingerprint, hair) and the infinitely large (the sun and the moon, celestial bodies). Their relationships hinge on a state of duality alluded by the logic of its construct: movement and stillness, fullness and emptiness, and life and death. Produced in collaboration with the Manufacture de Sèvres, this porcelain sculpture takes the form of a traditional Korean moon jar, but without any of its functional traits. Kimsooja uses only a needle to pierce into the vertical axis that generated this spherical form, releasing the heat and air that breathes life into this earthen body during its firing process.


김수자는 1990년 〈연역적 오브제〉 연작을 시작했다. 그녀는 창틀, 사다리, 농기구와 같이 쉽게 볼 수 있는 일상 물건에 천 조각을 활용해 바느질하고 감싸는 방식을 취했다. 천으로 물건을 감싸는 행위는 오브제의 구조와 존재를 다시금 확인시켰다.
여기서 보따리로 개념화된 달항아리는 반구체(그릇, vase)의 윗부분과 아랫부분을 결합하여 두 양극을 하나의 전체로 이어 붙임으로써 만들어진다. 한 덩어리의 점토는 중심을 축으로 한 지속적인 회전 운동을 통해 상하(수직)와 좌우(수평)의 폭을 획득하며, 그 내부 공간을 확장해 나간다. 두 부분을 완전히 봉합한 뒤, 작가는 나무 바늘 끝을 이용하여 상단에 작은 구멍을 낸다. 이렇게 남겨진 흔적의 표면은 그 안에 머무는 공기의 숨결을, ‘감싸진 비어 있음’의 형태로 품어낸다.
진열장에 놓인 많은 작품들은 신체의 흔적(손 모양의 도자, 지문, 머리카락)과 태양과 달 같은 천체적 규모의 무한성과의 연결을 탐구한다. 이 관계는 움직임과 정지, 충만함과 비어 있음, 삶과 죽음이라는 구조적 논리가 암시하는 이중적 상태에 기반한다. 세브르 도자 제작소(Manufacture de Sèvres)와의 협업으로 제작된 이 도자 조각은 전통적인 한국의 달항아리 형태를 취하지만, 그 기능적 특성은 갖추고 있지 않다. 김수자는 바늘을 구형의 수직축을 따라 관통시킴으로써 소성 과정 동안 이 흙에 생명을 불어넣었던 열과 공기를 해방시킨다.

Deductive Object : (Un)fold, 2023
Papier de riz coréen / Korean rice paper
Courtesy Kimsooja Studio et Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Anvers / Hong Kong
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The artist hand-pressed a sheet of hanji (traditional Korean rice paper) into a ball and then unfolded it back into a surface. The geometry of her hand and sphere translates into a landscape-like vertical dimension. In a sense, the work mirrors itself at a different state of existence. As if folding and unfolding fabric into a bottari, Kimsooja couples the structure of painting with that of sculpture in one continuum.


작가는 한 장의 전통 한지를 손으로 단단히 쥐어 구체로 만든 뒤, 다시 펼쳐 평면의 표면으로 되돌렸다. 손과 구의 기하학적 형태는 펼쳐진 한지 위에서 마치 풍경을 닮은 수직적 차원으로 전환된다. 어떤 의미에서 이 작업은 하나의 존재가 여러 상태로 존재하며 스스로를 비추는 구조를 지닌다. 천을 접고 펼쳐 보따리로 만드는 과정처럼, 김수자는 회화의 구조와 조각의 구조를 하나의 연속체 안에서 결합한다.