South Korean artist Kimsooja's exhibition at Bourse de Commerce in Paris embodies the oxymoron of a forward-facing retrospective. The show surveys a decades-spanning contemporary practice while imbuing some of the artist’s most emblematic works with new contextual possibilities. The 67-year-old artist was offered a carte blanche as part of the collection presentation by the private museum, titled Le monde comme il va (The World As It Goes). The resulting presentation, which Kimsooja named To Breathe – Constellation, wraps around the two lower levels of the monumental round architecture of the Pinault Collection, in the heart of the city's first arrondissement.

I would like to create works that are like water and air, which we cannot possess but which can be shared with everyone – Kimsooja

At the centre of the show and indeed the building itself is Kimsooja’s stunning intervention into the impressive architecture of the historic building, which was restored and transformed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando between 2017-2020. Inside the rotunda of the former stock exchange-turned museum, outfitted with Ando’s signature exposed concrete walls, the artist has installed a mirrored floor. It uses the language of minimalism to grandiose effect. As visitors walk on the mirrored surface, the building’s glass-and-copper dome and the skies above are reflected under one’s feet, as is the 19th-century multi-panel painting by Alexis-Joseph Mazerolle, Évariste Vital Luminais, Désiré François Laugée, Georges Clairin and Hippolyte Lucas which adorns the rotunda’s upper level and represents trade between the continents. “I would like to create works that are like water and air, which we cannot possess but which can be shared with everyone,” Kimsooja explains in a video interview filmed ahead of the opening. The mirrored floor is a show-stopper, a conceptual feat that impactfully unites central themes in the artist’s work, such as the weaving of one’s identity into the way we look at the world, or meditations on movement, displacement and memory. But it is also the hottest photo-op spot in Paris at the moment and though the work might seek to critically comment on this century of the self (it’s not easy to find a flattering angle to photograph yourself mirrored, full body, from above), a mirrored surface is a selfie magnet. 

And so, as I enter the exhibition space, I find myself postponing my own encounter with my reflection, choosing to circle the rotunda first. There, inside 24 wooden display cases that are part of the historic architecture, Kimsooja has installed individual artworks that take visitors on a circular path along her artistic and conceptual practice. A vitrine containing a film still from A Mirror Woman: The Sun & The Moon (2008) and two clay balls titled Deductive Object (2008-2024) is a mini-exhibition of sorts, an introduction to the artist’s preoccupations. In the video from which the still originates, Kimsooja filmed the sun, the moon and the ocean in Goa, India. The celestial bodies and ocean tide symbolise nature, harmony and the source of all living creatures. The balls of clay, meanwhile, hark back to the artist’s first clay ball, which she created for the Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art following an invitation to make a water vessel in response to We Are All Water (2006), an exhibition by Yoko Ono. Kimsooja sent a ball of clay in a partially dried state as a container of water.

Spheres and containers appear throughout the show, be it in the form of earthenware or a stretched-out piece of rice paper that the artist has crumpled up in her fist — the hand thus containing both the object and the artistic urge to mould it. Indeed, Deductive Object (2016), a plaster cast of the artist’s arms, is presented in an adjacent vitrine. A traditional Korean bed cover, known as a bottari, used to wrap and protect personal belongings — is a recurrent motif in the exhibition. These textiles appear both in the vitrines (one contains a white bottari dedicated to the artist’s late Berlin gallerist, Michael Kewenig) as well as in the level below, as multicoloured sculptural objects along with a video installation.

Back upstairs, another vitrine features a metal tray with ingredients for the Porridge Project (2024). The small multi-coloured mound contains various grains that make up the basic ingredients of porridge, a nutritious, simple food that provides comfort, healing and sustenance. It evokes a performance first presented at the Yinchuan Biennale in 2018, in which the artist prepared porridge and shared it with the public. It’s a piece that speaks of community and simplicity, but also, in the context of the Bourse de Commerce, of grains as a tradeable commodity, of famine and markets, and of abundance; it is simultaneously linked to the building’s present use as well as its layered history: before it became a commodities exchange, the structure was used by the city of Paris to store wheat.

This thrust towards universality in Kimsooja’s work and her ability to entwine experiences across space and time is perhaps most poignantly presented in her project A Needle Woman, which she began in 1999. On the museum’s underground level, beneath the rotunda, a four-channel video installation shows Kimsooja standing immobile in the middle of the frame, her back to the camera, hair in a ponytail. Around her, the hustle and bustle of urban life passes by; some spare a moment to look with bewilderment at the curious woman who stands in their way like a pillar, before moving on hurriedly. Shot in Shanghai, Delhi, Tokyo, and New York, Kimsooja’s static back becomes the thread that stitches the scenes together, a woman who stands firmly on ever-altering grounds. Back upstairs, in the vitrines, the motif of the needlewoman reappears in photographic works, such as A Needle Woman – Kitakyushu, which shows the artist’s body lying on the curvature of a rocky Japanese landscape, marking the line between the rock and the skies in the photographic frame. Elsewhere, A Needle Woman – Jaoseon, is a photo from a performance in the exhibition space Meridiano in Puerto Escondido, Mexico. Here, Kimsooja stands as a vertical axis inside Meridiano's architecture, defining the geometry of light and shadow within its open architecture.

Having circumvented the rotunda and traced its contours in the space below as I soaked up the other works in the show, I finally feel ready to venture into its centre. The mirrored floor reflects the afternoon sky, and the sun now hangs directly above the glass dome. I’m struck by the sun’s reflection and walk around until I find a spot from which the mirrored ceiling can be looked at without the blinding glare. The view is disorienting, and dizzying and a sense of vertigo forces me to lift my head and gaze at the concrete wall for a few long seconds. There’s a heightened awareness of my body and the space around me, and the illusion of an alluring abyss below me. I look down, take a selfie, then delete it.

‘Le monde comme il va’ is on view at Bourse de Commerce, Paris until September 2, 2024.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.)