The Brooklyn Rail

A veteran Korean artist who has been assiduously experimenting with light, textiles, and sound in various mediums over the past four decades, Kimsooja (b. 1957) brings these long-standing interests to bear in her new exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar. On the first floor is a massive, mirrored platform (an iteration of her ongoing work “To Breathe,” begun in 2003) on which visitors are invited to walk, once they trade out their shoes for fuzzy socks provided by the gallery. The mirrors surround a rectangle of a different material, onto which colored light projects from the ceiling above. The light extends to the edges of the rectangle and cycles through the visible spectrum, developing a constantly changing tableau, perhaps hearkening to the meta-painting of the exhibition’s title, as well as to the works installed on the second floor.

Because you can’t quite see your reflection as you circumambulate the platform, it’s easy to forget that it’s a mirror you’re walking on, and it soon feels as though you’re on one of those transparent bridges, where each step seems precarious though you know logically the danger is illusory. After a few laps around, the phenomenological experience starts to unseat perceptual certainties left and right. The ceiling is factually reflected underneath your feet—what is high got brought down—but in fact, it feels as though you’re walking above some cavernous depths, in some unexplainable defiance of physics. It feels at once a sort of breaking in of the eternal into the temporal, dissolving completely the toothache of words, as well as a bitter realization of how easily our perceptual faculties can turn on and betray us. The installation addresses and coaxes out our secret, enduring belief that perceptual reality can be made and remade to conform to an ideal mirror image. At its heart, more than being about subjective experience or sensorial abuse, the installation seems to gently repudiate our human desire to constantly reconfigure the world according to our perceptual specifications and exposes it as a false promise.

This enfoldment of space recalls the artist’s previous installations, such as her 2006 To Breathe—A Mirror Woman in the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid. Imbuing the space with the sound of her breathing, Kimsooja transported visitors allegorically into her own body, architecturally exteriorizing this most intimate, ritualistic bodily function required to live. Her installations often stage such experiential encounters with our selves by virtue of taking us outside ourselves. There is no vanishing point in these installations, no one single point in our field of vision that we might hold onto for guaranteed perspective. Instead, Kimsooja’s installations generate perceptual force fields that make us more aware of our bodies in space, to the point of self-objectification, particularly in To Breathe as well as another work in the exhibition, “Deductive Object” (1990-2024), which also makes use of a mirrored platform.

The artist’s works in the rest of the exhibition are more muted in their experiential effects. On the second floor is an exquisitely installed series of three new works of “Meta-Painting” (2019-2024) that suspend from the skylight ceiling. These austere canvases have no visible marks on them. Rather, the fibrous linen-like material covering the canvases is sheer enough that we can see through it to the crisscrossed wooden stretcher bars. The “content” of the works, then, lies in the very structural supports of the canvases, which act as both skeleton and spectral visualization.

Each suspended canvas is accompanied by wrapped bundles, called bottari, to which Kimsooja has consistently returned since first experimenting with the form in 1992. Traditionally composed of Korean bedcover cloth used to wrap personal belongings, the bottari has become a signature sculptural form for the artist. In the Korean historical imaginary, bottari signifies a nomadic lifestyle, largely due to war or forced relocation, as well as the concepts of wrapping and unwrapping. Unlike her previous iterations, which made use of colorful textiles, these, created with the same starchy material as the canvases, quietly assimilate into the surrounding concrete floor and walls. These bottari sculptures, as well as the hanging canvases, are marked by a priestly touch, their elegant aplomb and plangent undertones endowing the works with an apotropaic aura, as if they are able to ward off evil spirits. Possessing the kind of restraint characterizing the works of artists like Agnes Martin, Kimsooja’s new works wear their profundity lightly.