Kimsooja at He Art Museum China, Guangdong
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On the occasion of its fifth anniversary, He Art Museum in China commissioned artist Kimsooja to create a large-scale permanent installation, To Breathe, for the outdoor space adjacent to the museum, which was designed by Tadao Ando.
For He Art Museum, Kimsooja has envisioned a site-specific artwork consisting of two free-standing semicircular glass walls embedded in the landscape, slightly nested within each other, unfolding a dialogue between visitors and the surrounding environment. In resonance with HEM’s unique building—designed by Tadao Ando and his pursuit of an architecture of emptiness and infinity—Kimsooja’s artwork eschews a fixed center, leaving ample room for the public to walk within and around the garden landscape.
The glass panels are coated with diffraction grating film that functions like a prism, enabling the artwork to dynamically shift in color depending on changing sunlight and the viewer’s perspective. This creates a sensory experience in which light and color become as integral to the piece as the physical structure itself. The glass panels serve as light-catching canvases whose microstructures generate iridescent patterns reminiscent of concentric brushstrokes along vertical and horizontal axes.
The rich spectrum of rainbow hues diffracted across these prismatic surfaces resonates with Kimsooja’s ongoing investigation into “Obangsaek,” the traditional Korean five-color system. This palette shares its philosophical roots with the Chinese principle of Wuxing (五行) in the Taoist tradition, making the artwork particularly resonant within the cultural context of Foshan City.
The circular form of the work, with its transparent and reflective properties, evokes the dualities central to Kimsooja’s practice—light and shadow, interiority and exteriority, and the continuum between the singular and the infinite. It achieves this by visually rendering the intangible shifts and changes in the environment brought about by the cycle of life throughout the four seasons.
The installation invites us to reimagine public space, encouraging viewers to pause, reflect, and share a unique experience of light and time shaped by cosmological relationships.
Courtesy of He Art Museum
