ARTWORKS
To BreatheㅡSunhyewon
To BreatheㅡSunhyewon
To BreatheㅡSunhyewon, 2025, Site-specific installation with mirror panels, size variable.
Installed in Kyongheunggak, a traditional royal hanok pavilion at Sunhyewon, Kimsooja’s To BreatheㅡSunhyewon, 2025 is a site-specific installation that transforms the architecture through a single yet profound gesture: covering the entire floor with a mirror. As visitors walk across the mirrored surface, the layered rooftops, sky, and their own reflections unfold beneath their feet. The mirror dissolves boundaries between past and present, interior and exterior, self and otherㅡpositioning the viewer’s body as a vertical axis that completes the space. Here, simple acts such as walking, gazing, and breathing become integral to the artwork itself.
To BreatheㅡSunhyewon, 2025 extends Kimsooja’s long-standing exploration of identity, migration, and the poetics of emptiness. Much like her iconic Needle Woman, the body is envisioned as an unmoving vertical presenceㅡa needle stitching through the fabric of the world. The mirrored floor acts not just as a reflective surface but as an expanded canvas woven by the viewer’s gaze and movement. Between light and shadow, presence and absence, the viewer encounters their own being suspended between life and death, self and other, reality and virtuality. Kyongheunggak, with its deeply rooted history and cultural resonance, becomes through this work an “architectural bottari”ㅡa breathing space of reflection, memory, and shared totality.
