Born in 1957 in Daegu, Kimsooja is an internationally acclaimed multidisciplinary artist who currently lives and works between Paris and Seoul. She works across a broad range of media from performance, film, and photography to site-specific installations with textiles, light, and sound.

Kimsooja represented Korea at the 24th São Paulo Biennial (1998) and the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and has been invited to take part in more than 40 contemporary art biennials and triennials. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at such prestigious venues as MoMA PS1, the Reina Sofía Museum’s Palacio de Cristal, Vancouver Art Gallery, Kunsthalle Wien, Kunsthalle Bern, Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, SaintEtienne Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Bilbao and Centre Pompidou-Metz.

Kimsooja has taught at Beaux-Arts de Paris (2008-09) and was appointed Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2017. In 2022, Kimsooja inaugurated the stained-glass windows she designed for Metz’s gothic cathedral, which were commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture to mark the cathedral’s 800th anniversary.

In the interstitial dome space, the sound of the artist breathing permeates the air, along with the light transformed by her artwork titled The Weaving Factory (2004/2013).

Initially slow and barely perceptible, her inhalation and exhalation will gradually accelerate to become increasingly present – until the vitality of breathing intermingles with the sensory experience of colour. Surrounded by the rhythmic sound of breathing and the shifting chromatic landscape, the visitor is offered a unique opportunity for meditation and contemplation. By making two essential elements of life – air and light – visible and tangible, the artist suffuses the store with creative energy and invites each visitor to actively experience it for themselves.

'To breathe' echoes a particular aspect of Galeries Lafayette’s history. Back in the early 20th century, when the air was thought to be cleaner at altitude than in the streets, Parisians flocked to the department store to take advantage of the panoramic view. Standing on the rooftop terrace, they would look out over the city and breathe in the fresh air, enjoying a unique experience in the French capital.

Kimsooja first conceived To Breathe in 2006, where she conceptually transformed the bottari into an architectural form. Using diffraction film, the artist wraps entire spaces to sublimate their architecture and reveal their stories, like bottari bundles made of light.

A work in motion, To Breathe reacts to the natural environment, harnessing the way light changes over time, in accordance with the weather and as the sun moves across the sky. When rays of light pass through it, the diffraction film creates ephemeral rainbow spectrums that shift and change as people move around the space. The artist invites viewers to observe and experience these unique, iridescent landscapes of colour, brought about by the principles of ‘non-doing’ and ‘non-making’ that are central to her work.

Initiated in 2006 for the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid, Kimsooja’s To Breathe series has taken different forms over the years in various venues, including Centre Pompidou-Metz (2015-16) and Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul (2021).

Photos Jaeho Chong. Courtesy Kimsooja Studio