Kimsooja: A Mirror Woman: The Sun & The Moon

OPENING: August 22nd, 2008

Shiseido Gallery is pleased to announce our exhibition, Kimsooja A Mirror Woman: The Sun & The Moon. This is a solo exhibition of Kimsooja's newest works, which she shot in India in the beginning of this year.

Kimsooja's newest work, A Mirror Woman: The Sun & The Moon, is a four channel video work in which she filmed the sun, the moon, and the ocean in Goa, India. This work is a dynamic piece that deals with nature, with the sun and the moon, and high and low tides working in tandem as perfect examples of the ying and yang relationship, a theme that Kimsooja approaches in many of her works. In addition, we will be debuting her new large scale photographic works, The Sun - Unfolded.

Doris Von Drathen's essay, Standing at the Zero Point (2008), addresses this dynamic four channel video in the following excerpt:

Within the confines of our linear notion of experience and imagination, the conjunction of sun and moon is merely an idea and, to us, unthinkable. Exceptional constellations of planets, such as the eclipses of the sun and the moon, are, by their very essence, quite different, for these do not feature the two celestial bodies at the very same time, but more the moment of shadow when the one is moving in front of the other and robbing it of light. The actual conjunction of sun and moon bursts the bounds of our reality, in a way that has always been conceived as metaphor for expressing the transgression of the impossible, the transgression of the duality of day and night that occludes all formulae and laws of time and place. The conjunction of sun and moon is the icon of impossibility.

When, in her video installation A Mirror Woman: The Sun & The Moon, Kimsooja lets us experience precisely this impossibility on screen, she is not working with tricks. The sequence of images unfolds in real time, for the full duration of sunset and moonrise. One could almost say that the work of art in itself, however, remains invisible: it is the very point where Kimsooja is standing and observing the events in the sky. The artist is positioned on a spot, which is precisely gauged by seismograph, in fact at the zero point of a place, in that splice of space between the planets, in the chink between the orbits of sun and moon, on the verge of consciousness, at the brink of the mirror. The rest is waiting, with a fixed camera and an open frame, so that the rise of the moon and the setting of the sun are able to overlie one another.

The singularity of the work of Kimsooja, however, is that she does not illustrate such an idea as cosmic breath or universal principle that might well apply to the creation as a whole, but vice-versa, she derives it from an “almost” everyday observation. For were one to gaze like Kimsooja and her camera, one would after all be able to observe this conjunction of sun and moon, this respiratory chorale of the planetary orbits and the movement of the ocean every moment, every single month.

Kim Sooja
A Mirror Woman: The Sun & The Moon