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.

A Needle Woman: galaxy was a memory, earth is a souvenir (2025)
Developed by architect Jaeho Chong, collaborator on Kimsooja’s site-specific conical sculpture A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir (2014), this work unfolds as a dialogue between their distinct yet converging vocabularies. Rooted in painting for Kimsooja and in architecture for Chong, their practices meet in a shared meditation on spatiality, surface and the formal logic of the grid. The tower’s proportions unfold from its needle point downward, each segment halving the last in an infinite progression. This recursive structure mirrors the relationship between canvas and frame, balancing surface and support. At once an object and monument, the sculpture engages the viewer at a human scale while evoking the abstract precision of architectural thought.

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.

Desert X 2025 Coachella Valley, Desert Hot Springs, CA
March 8 - May 11 2025
For more information click HERE.


Our cultures, lifestyles, rituals, and belief systems may differ, but we are all connected by the air we breathe, the planet’s circular rotations, and the cycles of life and death that it sustains. This interconnectedness runs through a diverse body of Kimsooja’s work that includes sculpture, painting, film, performance, and installation.


In her latest installation, To Breathe – Coachella Valley, Kimsooja integrates various ideas from her broader practice. The glass structure serves to define a performance space, inviting the audience to interact with the essential elements of the desert: the texture of sand underfoot, the air we breathe, and the light around us. Drawing inspiration from bottaris, the fabric-encased bundles of belongings prominent in her work and in Korean culture, Kimsooja describes this installation as a “bottari of light.” By wrapping the glass surface in a unique optical film, she transforms the physical architecture into a dynamic spectrum of light and color. “This diffraction film acts as a transparent textile, featuring thousands of vertical and horizontal scratch lines akin to warp and weft, and envelops the architecture in light.”


Mirrors have also played a significant role in her exploration of light’s ephemerality. To Breathe – Coachella Valley reflects another work located in the desert of AlUla, Saudi Arabia. Connected by the air that sustains us, this iteration not only references its counterpart nearly 8,000 miles away but also acknowledges the historical origins of the Light and Space movement on the U.S. West Coast. With its ever-changing approach based on color spectrum theory from Chinese Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, To Breathe – Coachella Valley enriches these traditions by incorporating the female perspective of East Asia. The result is an experience that is both ephemeral and profound.


Generous support is provided by Ed Campanaro and Alan Weisberg, Ron Florance, Marcy and Harry Harczak, the Posner Foundation, Janelle Reiring, Melissa and John Russo, Roswitha Smale, and Richard H. Wood.