Kimsooja
South Korea
Based in New York, Paris and Seoul, Kimsooja (b.1957) is an international conceptual artist whose practice explores the totality of life and art, transcending distinctions of medium and form through works of painting, sewing, installation, performance, video, light and sound. In the 1980s, she began to experiment with alternative modes of expression while contemplating the two-dimensional structure of painting, leading to a series of sewing works that revealed a dualistic order of vertical and horizontal as the foundation of the world, thus expanding the object of her artistic inquiry from the material to the non-material. Kimsooja’s resolute pursuit of the latter and adoption of “non-doing, non-making” as an aesthetic framework inform her longstanding engagement with various media and methodologies, driving her persistent questioning of art and humanity in pursuit of conceptual, contemplative aesthetics and humanism.

Work
Featured Work
Kimsooja
To Breathe
2022
To Breathe (2022) is a site-specific artwork consisting of diffraction grating film that 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. The 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.



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