Meta-Painting (2020) started as an exploration into the origins and fundamental principles of painting at Wanås Konst Sculpture Park in Sweden, where Kimsooja planted, cultivated, and harvested flax. While the flax fibers were woven into linen canvas (the surface of oil paintings), its seeds were made into linseed oil (a key solvent in oil paint). Through the cultivation and harvesting of flax, the project reconstructed painting as a life-generating cycle —a notion that has been integral to Kimsooja’s practice since the beginning of her career as a painter. With Meta-Painting (2020), Kimsooja proposed a conceptual relationship between the unpainted canvas, agriculture and textiles, a recurring theme that can be traced back to works such as Agriculture from 1988, establishing a form of painting that transcends the traditional act of painting itself.
Kimsooja’s black Meta-Painting (2025) series extends this notion of ‚non-doing’ that both resists and stores markers of time. The works take form as both a flat and multidimensional surface, composed of countless invisible layers of sprayed dots, continuing the formalistic trajectory of Kimsooja’s folded and unfolded Bottari: fabric bundles which embody the act of wrapping people’s lives and memories. While the depth of black color absorbs nearly all traces of light and shadow, its surface resists our discernment. The series thus conceptualizes and brings to reality the absence of light, encapsulating both the void and the sum of all colors. Much like light, which manifests as localized particles and all-encompassing waves, Kimsooja's Meta-Painting (2025) superimposes states of presence and absence, life and death, revealing that what seems absent can still hold the entirety of what exists.


〈메타-페인팅〉(2020)은 스웨덴 바노스 콘스트 조각공원(Wanås Konst Sculpture Park)에서 김수자가 아마(flax)를 직접 심고 재배하며 수확하는 과정을 통해 회화의 기원과 근본 원리를 탐구하는 프로젝트로 시작되었다. 아마 섬유는 린넨 캔버스로 짜였고, 씨앗은 유화 물감의 주요 용제인 린시드 오일로 만들어졌다. 아마를 경작하고 수확하는 과정을 통해서 이 프로젝트는 회화를 생명 생성의 순환 과정으로 재구성했는데, 이는 김수자가 화가로서의 경력 초창기부터 지속해 온 중요한 사유이기도 하다. 〈메타-페인팅〉(2020)을 통해 김수자는 채색되지 않은 캔버스, 농경, 텍스타일 사이의 개념적 관계를 제시했는데, 이는 1988년 작 〈농경〉 등 초기 작업으로까지 거슬러 올라가는, 자주 등장해 온 주제다. 이로써 작가는 전통적인 ‘그리는 행위’를 넘어서는 새로운 형식의 회화를 구축한다.
김수자의 〈메타-페인팅〉(2025) 흑색 회화 연작은 시간의 흔적을 품으면서도 그에 저항하는 ‘비-행위(non-doing)’의 개념을 더욱 확장한다. 이 작품들은 수많은 보이지 않는 분사(噴射) 점층들이 겹겹이 쌓여 이루어진 평면이자 다차원적 표면들로 구성되며, 접고 펼쳐지는 보따리 – 사람들의 삶과 기억을 감싸는 행위를 내포한 천 보따리 – 의 형식적 궤적을 잇는다. 검은색의 깊이는 거의 모든 빛과 그림자를 흡수하지만, 그 표면은 우리의 시각적 판독을 거부한다. 따라서 이 연작은 빛의 부재를 개념화하고 그것을 실재를 통해 구현함으로써 ‘비어 있음’과 모든 색의 총합을 동시에 담아낸다. 미세한 입자이면서도 모든 곳에 파동으로 퍼지는 빛처럼, 〈메타-페인팅〉(2025)은 존재와 부재, 삶과 죽음이라는 상태를 겹쳐서 보여준다. 그 결과, 비어 있는 것처럼 보이는 자리에도 존재의 총체가 머무를 수 있음을 시사한다.

Deductive Object – Black Garden, 2024
Matte black paint on 5 wooden sculptures, wooden board
Courtesy Kimsooja Studio


Deductive Object – Black Garden comprises five geometric forms painted in a deep black hue. The surface of these forms absorbs enough light to make them appear bi-dimensional, opening a space of uncertainty. Though it is black, there is an absence of shadow, and thus an absence of light; it embraces all colors, but resists our discernment. This investigation into color, light, and primitive symbols resonates with the notion of duality, which has been a recurring motif in Kimsooja’s body of work. The geometric structures present in Kimsooja’s art often disclose contrasting forces inherent in art and life—light and shadow, interiority and exteriority, and life and death.
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짙은 흑색으로 채색된 다섯 개의 기하학적 형태로 이루어져 있는 이 구조물들의 표면은 빛을 흡수하여 마치 이차원적 평면처럼 보이게 만듦으로써 불확실성의 공간을 열어 둔다. 비록 검은색이지만, 그림자가 존재하지 않기에 빛도 부재하며 모든 색을 포용하면서도 우리의 인지를 끊임없이 거부한다. 이는 색과 빛, 그리고 원초적 상징에 대한 탐구로 김수자 작업 전반에 반복적으로 등장하는 이중성의 개념과 깊이 공명한다. 김수자의 작업에 자주 나타나는 기하학적 구조는 예술과 삶 속에 내재한 대립적 힘, 즉 빛과 그림자, 내면과 외부, 삶과 죽음 등을 드러내는 장치로 기능한다. 이러한 대비는 작가의 사유가 지향하는 근원적 질문을 시각화하며, 형태와 색채 너머의 존재론적 깊이를 제시한다.

In the Presence of Absence, Desert X AlUla 2024, Alula, Saudi Arabia
9 Feb 2024 to 23 March 2024
For more information click HERE.


To Breathe – AlUla encapsulates Kimsooja’s contemplation of the original geographical forms and elements that shaped the region’s distinct desert and volcanic landscape. The core natural elements that took shape within this topography – from cracks in the volcanic stones and monumental sandstone mountains, to the delicate leaves of grass that, with the help of the wind, brush circular forms onto the soil – draw life through a phenomenon of contraction and expansion. As the artist explains, “it is nature’s breathing that transforms the earth’s surface across a deep arc of time.” The life cycle of the Earth in space and time has been Kimsooja’s inspiration and leaves a strong impact on her artistic vision.


The movement of wind and the path of light – which reflects, refracts, and traverses through the spiral paths of To Breathe – AlUla’s glass walls – echo the conceptual and geometrical formation of the desert landscape. Coated with a special film, the glass is a translucent canvas with a microstructure of thousands of vertical and horizontal grooves that function as prisms. Sunlight refracts through this surface into an iridescent color spectrum, casting rainbow-colored shadows and circular brushstrokes onto the sandy earth. Audiences partake in a contemplative performance by walking through and gazing at the shifting light spectrums that render visible the vibrations of colors normally invisible to the naked eyes. With Kimsooja’s words, “it is a walk in and out of a contained yet open spiral path that unfolds an abstract ‘lightscape’ – at once a drawing, a painting, and a sculpture.”

To Breathe – Constellation
20 March to 2 September 2024
For more information click HERE


Her installation in the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce is both monumental and ethereal: an immense mirror on the floor that, as one approaches, inverts the architecture and the order of the world with it, the sky opening up in the middle of the building, beneath our feet. Kimsooja is also taking over the 24 display cases in the Passage and the lower level of the museum with works and video installations that address her favourite themes: identity, borders, memory, exile, movement, and weaving.


“I would like to create works that are like water and air, which we cannot possess but which can be shared with everyone”, Kimsooja says. Since the late 70s, her work has asserted itself on the international art scene as an essential, universal experience. After studying painting in Seoul, she distanced herself from all art teachings and practice, embracing everyday gestures such as sewing to explore the issues of identity, involvement, individual and collective memory, and the individual’s place in the world. In the performance in 1997 that made her famous, she spent eleven days travelling across Korea perched atop a lorry loaded with bottaris, the traditional, shimmering Korean fabric bundles used to mark major events in people’s lives, from birth to marriage to death.


As a nomadic artist, a “cosmopolitan anarchist” as she calls herself, Kimsooja metaphorically uses her own body like an anonymous, almost invisible presence whose immobility and verticality become a kind of needle that threads through the fabric of the world.


The mirror that she has used to cover the floor of the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce plays a similar role to that of the needle or of her own body.