In Meta-Painting, Kimsooja deepens her exploration of perception, materiality, and the thresholds of vision through a surface composed of countless layers of ultra–light-absorbing black pigment. This dense, absorptive field resists visual legibility, drawing the viewer into a space where the act of looking becomes an introspective experience. Rather than offering an image, the work presents a site of near-total darkness—what the artist describes as The Unknown—inviting each viewer to encounter the limits of sight and the quiet, internal reflections that arise within that encounter.

Suspended from the gallery’s high ceilings, Meta-Painting – Seven Colors expands this inquiry through a materially distinct method. Formed from seven aligned glass panels of transparent color—lime yellow, red, green, cobalt blue, violet, and other hues—the work reveals an unexpected phenomenon: when viewed together, these colors overlap to produce a darkened, blackish field. Here, blackness is not the result of pigment but a perceptual event created by the convergence of multiple wavelengths of light. The glass panels remain unaltered two-dimensional planes, where minimal intervention transforms them into a contemplative field that enfolds light, color, and perception. In doing so, Kimsooja expands the traditional notion of painting, reconfiguring the surface into an ever-changing chromatic field.

Together, Meta-Painting and Meta-Painting – Seven Colors offer complementary yet contrasting pathways into the experience of darkness. One achieves black through the absorption of light; the other through the accumulation of color. In their dialogue, Kimsooja repositions blackness as a space of contemplation—an encounter with the shifting boundaries between presence and absence, and with the reflective, interior dimension of the self.

In her work, Meta Painting - Glass Samples, Kimsooja presents a visual archive of handmade glass samples sourced for her permanent stained-glass installation, commissioned on the occasion of the 800th anniversary of the Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Metz. The glass pieces, which were carefully selected for their light and textural qualities, reflect the artist’s minimal style and interest in “non-doing” and “non-making”. This emphasis on the material reality and painterly qualities of the chosen glass pieces, allows for a more contemplative gaze on the work.

With Deductive Language, the material notion of contemplation found in Metapainting is expanded into a corporeal language, as Kimsooja examines the psychological dimension of the hands. Each image captures a single gesture, performed in real time by the artist. The hands may rest apart, or move independently or together, sometimes touching one another. At times highly independent, the hands can also emerge as instruments of violence, difficult to control. Yet, inseparably connected to the brain’s neural system, they inscribe a sensation and thought with immediacy.

In the exhibition, the works address the senses, and remove the artist as creator from the work. Whether it is blackness as the total absence of light or the gesture of the hand connected to thought and the subconscious, Kimsooja’s works suggest a way of contemplating the unknown: not the void of negation but the space where perception is heightened and the doubled, recursive nature of subjectivity is revealed.