Overview
Delicately balancing conceptual precision with intimate sensory experience, KOO’s practice embraces ephemerality, transformation, and entropy, crafting works and environments that are at once minimal and deeply affective.
KOO JEONG A is renowned for a synesthetic and multi-faceted approach to art-making that encompasses drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, film, sound, animation, augmented reality, and architecture. By incorporating intangible elements such as light, temperature variations, scent, and sound, the artist has established a multisensory formal lexicon that engages the viewer beyond a purely visual register.
The largest presentation of KOO’s work in France to date, LAND OF OUSSS [KANGSE] brings together a major body of new and recent works spanning from 2007 to the present. Showcasing sculptures, an olfactory installation, and a series of phosphorescent paintings, as well as more intimate ink drawings, the exhibition extends the artist’s enduring exploration of movement, weightlessness, levitation, and voids. ‘OUSSS,’ a word coined by KOO, variously reappears as a sound, a substance, a being, and a land suggestive of a personal and shifting physical and mental territory.
KOO often creates site-specific works that intertwine unseen forces and natural phenomena—gravity, magnetic fields, phosphorescence—with speculative ideas, uncanny imaginaries, and personal memories. Dispersed across two levels of The Tower, the exhibition includes [KANGSE SpSt] (2024), a scent-diffusing, levitating figure that greets visitors in LUMA Arles’ Drum, and a series of wooden sculptures intricately fashioned in the shape of Möbius strips. KOO’s installations at LUMA Arles also enter into dialogue with Frank Gehry’s monumental design and the history of Arles, engaging in a subtle interplay of echoes and reflections. The site-specific rock sculptures, [EVER] [VAST] (2025), resonate with the sinuous tower structure, itself inspired by the soaring rock clusters found in the nearby Alpilles Mountains, while [SEVEN STARS] (2020), a series of luminescent paintings, inevitably evokes The Starry Night (1889) by Van Gogh.
Using both imperceptible gestures and immersive, large-scale public installations, KOO’s practice constructs personal cosmologies that dissolve conventional perceptions of time, space, and materiality, opening up portals into alternative dimensions. The universe of ‘OUSSS’ defines an enigmatic space of innate connections between telluric and cosmic matters and explores how intimately entangled we are with the invisible forces that shape our reality.
