Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to participate in Art Basel in Hong Kong’s Insights Sector with a solo booth by South-Korean artist Kimsooja (° Daegu, 1957). The site-specific installation, Encounter – A Mirror Woman (2017-2019), is encouraged by the recent art commission the artist developed for the city of Poitiers, the native place of Michel Foucault. It combines mirror floor surface, mirror walls, and a folded mirror screen that echo notions of reciprocity and dualism through its layering of multiple spatial dimensions. The emplacement of this particular work within the broader milieu of a prominent art fair, will transform the limited spatial confines of the art booth as a temporary heterotopic site. This installation takes its cue from Foucault’s influential concept of heterotopia, as ‘a site that has the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that [it] happen[s] to designate, mirror, or reflect. [A] space, as it were, which [is] linked with all the others, which however contradict[s] all the sites.’ Encounter – A Mirror Woman will create an enclosure as it frames the booth within the artwork itself. The mirror floor clearly delineates the limit of the booth from its surroundings. This small ritual not only demands a certain form of care from the visitors when they enter the work, but also invites them to take part in opening up a different kind of space. Encounter – A Mirror Woman, was previously introduced as a site-specific installation at Axel Vervoordt Gallery in Antwerp in 2018. Here, the artist used horizontal and vertical mirrors to reconstruct the gallery space, a former gin distillery, inviting the visitors to a new spatial experience. This installation echoed the memory of the site while transcending traces of history into a new corporeal experience. Kimsooja sees mirrors as a possibility to fold and unfold spaces to depict actual subjects close to her heart, such as people fleeing in search of a refuge. An earlier work, A Mirror Woman – The Ground of Nowhere (2003), also dealt with a similar theme. For this piece, she transformed the ground of Honolulu’s town hall with mirrors and installed a fine white gauze curtain that hung eighteen meters in the sky. The ‘sky’ was thus reflected on the ground, and when visitors walked over the mirrors, they saw the representation of hopes and expectations that Korean migrants must have felt on their nautical journey to the USA. Kimsooja also represented the Korean Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale with her piece, To Breathe: Bottari. Through the use of diffraction grating film, the artist unraveled the invisible light spectra into rainbow colors on the ceiling, wall, and floor surfaces. The artwork transformed and transcended the existing architecture by rendering visible its interior void. The inner architectural volume delineated by color spectrum woven across repeated reflections, along with a sound performance of the artist’s breaths, created the illusion of the space itself inhaling and exhaling. Kimsooja’s use of mirror as a way to alter space builds upon the themes of wrapping and unwrapping that she has explored in her past bottari works. The practice of tying together anonymous people’s clothing inside a used bedcover – a place where we are born, love, suffer, and die – has evolved and dematerialized in the form of a mirror.