Born in 1957 in Daegu, Kimsooja is an internationally acclaimed multidisciplinary artist who currently lives and works between Paris and Seoul. She works across a broad range of media from performance, film, and photography to site-specific installations with textiles, light, and sound.

Kimsooja represented Korea at the 24th São Paulo Biennial (1998) and the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and has been invited to take part in more than 40 contemporary art biennials and triennials. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at such prestigious venues as MoMA PS1, the Reina Sofía Museum’s Palacio de Cristal, Vancouver Art Gallery, Kunsthalle Wien, Kunsthalle Bern, Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, SaintEtienne Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Bilbao and Centre Pompidou-Metz.

On Galeries Lafayette’s invitation, Korean artist Kimsooja illuminates the department store’s architecture with her light-oriented installation “To Breathe”.

By covering the iconic glass dome in Galeries Lafayette’s Paris Haussmann store with a special film that diffracts natural light into all the colours of the rainbow, Kimsooja transforms the dome’s external surfaces and internal spaces into iridescent landscapes that shift and change throughout the day. For this site-specific installation (the first in Paris on this scale), Kimsooja explores the building’s sensory and meditative qualities by focusing visitors’ attention on light to create an environment conducive to contemplation.

Centred around the store’s historic glass dome, Kimsooja’s installation creates an unprecedented dialogue with this iconic element of Galeries Lafayette’s architectural heritage.

When it was first built back in 1912, the dome flooded the store’s interior with a multitude of hues thanks to the stained-glass windows designed by Jacques Grüber, since removed and replaced with white glass. By cleverly bringing coloured light back into the heart of this historic art nouveau building, To Breathe weaves a strong but delicate thread between works of art imagined more than a century apart.

Korean artist Kimsooja, invited by Galeries Lafayette to “inhabit” the historic dome, gave herself a form of remembrance.

Having chosen to dress it with a film diffracting light into rainbow spectra, it pays homage to Jaques Grüber, the great master glassmaker of Art Nouveau who, when the dome was built in 1912, had created colorful stained-glass windows, subsequently deposited, and replaced by white glass.

It is a question of mixing “the energy of the breath” with “the sensitive experience of color in the heart of a changing chromatic space” to make visible and perceptible “two essential principles of life”: air and light.

Expecting to infuse a “creative energy” within the store, Kimsooja takes us in his very experimental and contemplative conception of the work of art: adept of the “non-far” principle, the artist seeks to make perceptible intangible notions, such as the passage of time, and to “question the forces at work in art and life, inviting everyone to experience and feel the world in all its surfaces.”

After the Crystal Palace of Madrid and the Cathedral of Metz, here for two months, the great “luxury bazaar” neo-Byzantine again flooded with iridescent hues.
A luminous cladding accompanied by a body experience offered to visitors in the heart of the dome, or, more precisely, in the in-between cupola, where we are invited to breathe the artist’s work “at the rhythm of his own breath” to live, in our turn, the illuminated space…

Visitors will be able to experience “To Breathe” on sunny days at the Galeries Lafayette Paris Haussmann storebetween April 14 and October 29, 2023.
The installation will be visible from the 8th floor terrace and inside the interstitial dome space (located on the 5th floor and exceptionally open to the public during the installation).