Kimsooja: Respirar - Una Mujer Espejo / To Breathe - A Mirror Woman: Palacio de Cristal, Parque del Retiro, Madrid

Kimsooja (Taegu, South Korea, 1957) is one of the most recognized Korean artists on the international art scene. Since 1998 he has lived and worked in New York and his work has been widely exhibited in Asia, North America and Europe and developed through installations, photographs, performances and videos. The artist addresses themes such as: nomadism, the relationship between the self and the other, the roles of women in the world and the importance of the human being in today's chaotic world, their loneliness and transience.

During the 1990s, Kimsooja creates spatial objects and installations and uses sewing as a metaphor and as an activity in itself. The materials she uses and the way she arranges them derive from the use of fabrics in the Korean tradition. A characteristic element are the "bottari", stuffed bundles of old clothes made with traditional Korean quilts. The brightly colored Korean bedspreads symbolize for the artist women, sex, love, the body, sleep, privacy, fertility, longevity and health.

At the end of the nineties, Kimsooja produced a series of videos based on performances carried out in different parts of the world, where the common denominator was the immobile female figure. Throughout her career and especially in recent years, along with her installations, photographs, performances and videos, the artist has carried out specific intervention projects in various spaces. The fabrics, especially the quilts, the sequences of light, the sound, the chants of the Tibetan, Gregorian and Islamic monks, his own breathing, are some of the resources he uses and that have become a hallmark of his work. . His works seem to be surrounded by silence, in them beats an aspiration to isolation, seclusion and the use of the exhibition space as a sanctuary.

Kimsooja has made an installation for the Palacio de Cristal made up of an intervention in space and a piece of sound. The artist wanted the architectural structure of the building to form a unitary whole. With the minimum elements, a translucent diffraction film that covers the entire glass structure of the palace, a mirror that runs across the floor and the sound of your breathing, immerses the visitor in a transfiguring experience in which they are invited to experiment with the mind and senses and activate their sensory perceptions and imagination.

Courtesy Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid and Kimsooja Studio.

Photo by Jaeho Chong