Kimsooja, To Breathe - Archive of Prototype

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.

Kanaal’s Patio Gallery features an installation of fifteen stained-glass windows, titled “Meta-Painting”, that fills the central space with the subtle glow of their colour spectrum. Kimsooja created these works following her intervention in the south transept of Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Metz, in collaboration with glassblower Pierre-Alain Parot (Dijon).[1] Like a dimensional painting, without brush and paint, this intervention builds on central notions in Kimsooja's art: performance through “non-doing”, a statement through “non-invention”, thus exploring concepts such as materiality and immateriality, mobility and immobility, duality and totality. In Metz, the translucent sunlight causes the space to fill with a radiant reflective spectrum of colour, as if would be breathing. Responsive to the natural environment, the installation is in constant change, making every experience different.

At the same time, the architecture of the space seems bundled in this way. The intervention builds on the notion of Kimsooja's well-known series of bottari, bundles of possessions made by people who are on the move, displaced, making the wrapped items intimate and precious totalities. Kimsooja identifies her Bottari as “a self-contained world – but one which, like a vessel, can contain everything materially and conceptually". As in other works, the colour spectrum refers to the patterns of the Obangsaek, representing the cardinal directions and five natural elements. The colours occur frequently in everyday life. When used for special occasions, such as Korean weddings, they refer directly to the body and life’s journeys.

The visitor is invited to get in the middle of the reflections and diffuse transparencies, becoming a participant rather than a spectator: an abstract light landscape unfolds with every walk through the installation. Only fragments of recognisability can be reconstructed when looking through the windows: due to the techniques used, they are half translucent and half reflective. Kimsooja and Atelier Parot chose to superimpose different glass techniques: traditionally blown and dichroic industrial.[2]

The glass and the colourful world behind it always look different when walking and approaching. At the same time, the glass allows light to enter most naturally: a sign of Kimsooja's great respect for nature and the original patterns of architectural structures. It is also a sign of her inclusive attitude towards all religions and worldviews: the stained-glass windows were created in a Catholic edifice, while the five cardinal colours are mainly in the realms of Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. The meeting between the two is like a delicate bridge Kimsooja wants to build between people, cultures, and communities, and their traditions, customs, and habits.

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.

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.

[1] Pierre-Alain Parot (1950-2023) was a pioneering glassmaker renowned for his innovative techniques in creating dichroic glass, transforming the field of glass art with its multi-colored, angle-dependent properties. Among his major achievements are the restoration of the Millennium stained-glass window of the Strasbourg Cathedral and the stained-glass window in the left transept of the Tours Cathedral. After the 2019 Notre-Dame fire, Atelier Parot also helped restore the stained-glass windows.

[2] Dichroic glass is a type of glass that displays different colors depending on the angle of view, unlike traditional blown glass which typically has a consistent color throughout.