Deductive Object (2025)
This scaled version of Deductive Object maintains the conceptual framework of Kimsooja’s original large-scale sculpture while rearticulating its formal presence. The work takes its form from the brahmanda stone of India, known as the “cosmic egg.” The cosmic egg symbolizes totality, encompassing both birth and death. This work may be perceived as a bottari bundle or as the body itself. Often suspended above a mirror, the black stone absorbs surrounding light, and this installation may likewise be understood “painting” as an act of “wrapping” of this elliptical sculpture.

Meta Painting – The Grid (2025)
The gridded composition of the suspended works function both as a spatial framework and a contemplative drawn surface. Developed in collaboration with Jaeho Chong, these pieces built on Kimsooja's earlier object-based works, such as her textile-wrapped wooden window frames, or letterbox, where everyday forms are reimagined through acts of deduction and unfolding. Here, the grid becomes more than a visual structure: it serves as a meditative system of repetition and subtle variation of vertical and horizontal lines and surfaces. Extending Kimsooja’s longstanding exploration of verticality and horizontality as structuring axis between the grounded and the transcendent, this new series incorporates principles of seriality and modular construction. Suspended just off the wall, they occupy a liminal space between drawing and sculpture, inviting close attention to rhythm, form and intimacy through its quiet geometry.

Meta Painting – Glass Swatches (2025)
In Meta Painting – Glass Swatches (2025), Kimsooja presents a visual archive of handmade glass samples sourced for her permanent stained-glass installation, commissioned on the occasion of the 800th anniversary of the Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Metz. The glass pieces—carefully selected for their light and textural qualities—reflect the artist’s interest in "non-doing" and “non-making,” where the absence of overt production gives way to the presence of its inherent qualities. The emphasis shifts from creation to observation, positioning the archive as a vessel of material reality and painterly practice.

Meta Painting – Seven Colors (2025)
In this work, Kimsooja suspends a sequence of vertically aligned glass panels, each rendered in a distinct color, which overlap to dissolve into a final black hue. The convergence of chromatic differences into black extends her inquiry into unity, void, and transcendence, recalling her earlier use of color as mediation between spectrum and convergence. Her sustained exploration of ‘non-doing’ and ‘non-making’—as the glass panels remain unaltered two-dimensional planes—opens onto a spatial expansion into a three-dimensional vacuum, where minimal intervention transforms into a contemplative field that enfolds light, color, and perception. In doing so, Kimsooja expands the traditional notion of painting, reconfiguring the surface into an ever-changing chromatic field.

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