A silent figure stands with its back facing the viewer, poised motionless against the ebb and flow of the anonymous crowd, unsheltered and without a want. Standing in front of A Needle Woman, a performance/video work (1999-2009) by the acclaimed artist Kimsooja, we see a body which, without doing anything, becomes a measure of time and space. As the artist's body weaves ceaselessly through the crowd, it shifts in and out of our field of vision. For a fleeting moment we experience our body transposed into hers, and through the borrowed gaze of the artist we confront our own impermanence in the face of time.

Her most recent work, similarly titled, A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir, carries this experience forward in a new form of practice. It is the result of a close collaboration between Kimsooja, the nanoscientist Ulrich Wiesner, and myself, an architect, on the occasion of the Cornell University's inaugural art biennial organized by Stephanie Owens, director of the Cornell Council for the Arts. Sited at the heart of the university's Arts Quad, the 46 foot high 4.5 foot diameter custom-fabricated steel structure is fleshed out with transparent acrylic panels that have been individually coated in iridescent nanopolymer. Under a raking light, each of these panels transforms the entire pavilion into a radiant spectrum of color as the molecularly engineered 'block copolymer,' produced by Hiroaki Sai and Ferdinand Kohle from the Wiesner Group, refracts various wavelengths of light dependent on the angle from which it is viewed. The interior of the floor is mirrored, doubling and extending the sky into the ground.

Cornell has a long history of commissioning site-specific art works. Perhaps those best known came out of the seminal 1969 Earth Art show curated by Willoughby Sharp, which brought together a group of young artists, including Hans Haacke, Richard Long, Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, and Günther Uecker, to produce new works on campus. Many of these artists treated the earth itself as a canvas and as sculptural material, just as today Kimsooja sees the earth as a "readyused" object – an idea akin to Duchamp's readymades, or Piero Manzoni's 1961 Socle Du Monde. In fact, much like Duchamp's attitude, Kimsooja's work resists human desire and adoration for visual pleasure, never making anything, but creating new thoughts for any given object or phenomenon. However, drawing such a formalistic relationship between the two artists in using found objects has its limits. For instance, the idea of the needle employed by Kimsooja, in her own words, is "a medium, a mystery, a reality, a hermaphrodite, a barometer, a moment, and Zen," which is much closer to a state of empathy than to a rationale of apathy. It echoes the spirit of Arte Povera, whose attitude, according to Germano Celant, is "intent upon retrieving the factual significance of the emerging meaning of human life."

What then, led an artist who refuses to 'make' objects to conceive a 46-foot tall 'sculpture'? At the first meeting between the collaborators, Kimsooja was presented with a small vial containing an iridescent substance. Generally known as 'structural color,' and characterized by Ulrich Wiesner as 'block copolymer,' this chemically grown chain of monomers produce a continuous banding of molecules with light-refracting qualities similar to those found on the wings of butterflies or the shells of beetles. When examined under an electron microscope, it appears as a striated fabric. Needless to say, Kimsooja's sustained interest in used fabrics as a tableau of life finds another scale of reality here. Such a profound consistency between nanoscientific phenomena and her artistic practice allows her to work within an invisible realm outside the register of human senses and to bring reality closer to our own experience – a practice to which she has always been committed.