Gyre: Inside Yunchul Kim’s Living System at the Korea Pavilion

ART & CULTURE · VENICE

Reading time: 9 min

In the Giardini’s smallest national pavilion, a Seoul artist with no formal science training built his own cosmic ray detector and wired it into a fifty metre polymer sculpture, a chandelier fed by Venice’s own seawater and a wall of shifting mineral colour. For the 2022 Venice Biennale, Yunchul Kim’s Gyre turned the Korea Pavilion into a single interconnected organism, and opened its roof for the first time to let it breathe.

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Between April and November 2022, the Republic of Korea Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale hosted an exhibition that behaved less like a display of separate artworks and more like a single nervous system spread across five rooms. Titled Gyre, it was commissioned by Arts Council Korea, curated by Youngchul Lee and made almost entirely by one artist, Yunchul Kim, working with a small team at his Seoul studio. It ran alongside the main exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale, Cecilia Alemani’s The Milk of Dreams, through 27 November 2022.

The premise was unusual even by Biennale standards. A detector built from modified Geiger counter tubes, designed to register subatomic particles called muons that constantly rain down from cosmic rays, was wired to trigger a fifty metre sculpture made of hundreds of transparent polymer cells. A separate chandelier pumped Venetian seawater through a lattice of glass tubing. A third piece grew its colour from a mineral called vermiculite, visible only through lenses Kim had built himself. None of this was decorative. Each piece was a working instrument, and together they formed one circuit.

The argument Gyre makes is that a building and an artwork can share the same logic. The Korea Pavilion was built in 1995 around a tree its architects refused to remove. Twenty-seven years later, for the first time in the building’s history, part of its roof was taken off so that a piece of scientific apparatus could register what falls from the sky. That is the connection this piece sets out to draw, and it starts with the person who built the apparatus.

A self-taught scientist’s studio

Yunchul Kim was born in Seoul in 1970. His training was not in a laboratory. He studied electronic music composition at Chugye University for the Arts in Seoul, then moved to Germany to study audiovisual art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Music, not physics, is the discipline he names as the root of his practice: he has described his sculptures as scores that other matter performs.

The science came afterwards, and he taught it to himself. Kim runs his own laboratory in Seoul, where he mixes chemicals, tests their behaviour under different conditions and records the results in notebooks, the way a researcher would. He has synthesised his own nanometre-scale iron particles from a reaction between iron chloride and ammonia, and built his own particle detectors out of modified Geiger counter tubes, the same components used in Argos, the muon detector that anchors Gyre. He founded his studio, Locus Solus, in Seoul in 2014, and two years later won the Collide International Award, a residency shared between Arts at CERN and FACT Liverpool that places an artist inside the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. He returned to CERN for a second residency in 2023.

What makes this worth stating plainly is that Kim’s authority in Gyre does not rest on borrowed scientific credentials. It rests on having built the instruments himself, which is why the exhibition reads as genuine research rather than an artist’s illustration of somebody else’s science.

Six works, one nervous system

Gyre comprised six pieces, five of them new and interlinked, plus a site-specific wall drawing that gave the show its title.

Chroma V, the largest work, is a fifty metre kinetic sculpture made of 382 individual transparent polymer cells strung through the pavilion’s rooms in a single continuous line. Each cell contains a mechanism that bends thin polymer layers to shift the colour and brightness passing through it, so the whole sculpture reads as a long, breathing spine linking every space in the building. Kim has compared it to a nervous system: the piece that carries signal from one part of the body to another.

Argos, the Swollen Suns supplies that signal. It is built from hundreds of glass tubes, drawn directly from Kim’s own muon detectors, arranged to register the passage of muons, the subatomic particles produced when cosmic rays strike the upper atmosphere and that continually pass, invisibly, through every object and every visitor in the room. Each detected particle triggers a flash of light and sends an electronic pulse to the other works, setting Chroma V’s colour shifts and other pieces’ movements in motion. The result is a sculpture powered not by a motor on a timer but by matter falling out of the sky.

Impulse, an earlier work from 2018 that Kim adapted for the pavilion, takes the form of a chandelier of interlaced glass tubing through which seawater drawn from the Venetian lagoon is continuously pumped, physically threading the city’s own water through the exhibition. Flare, from 2014, seals two liquids of different viscosity inside a hydrophilic coating and rotates the mixture with a motor, producing a slow, silvery churn that Kim calls a wet flame. La Poussière de Soleils, made from a mineral called vermiculite, shifts colour according to its own density and is legible only through specially built lenses, its light wavelength governed by microcomputers. It takes its French title from a play by the writer Raymond Roussel, whose obsessive, self-generating wordplay is one of the reference points Kim has cited for his own working method.

Gyre itself, the wall drawing that gives the show its name, runs across the pavilion in mathematical notation, shamanic symbols and cascading forms, less a caption for the other works than a diagram of the labyrinth they together describe.

Why Gyre

The title is not a loose metaphor for spirals. Youngchul Lee has traced it directly to W. B. Yeats’s 1919 poem The Second Coming, and its opening image of a falcon spiralling so far from its handler that contact is lost: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer.” Lee has described Argos in similar terms, as standing for a sun that has lost its absolute power, its authority scattered into signal rather than held at a single centre.

Kim’s own account pushes the idea further into the physical works themselves. He has spoken of the spiral as a form that neither locks things in nor shuts them out, interweaving states that are usually held apart: continuity and disruption, stability and instability, the human and the nonhuman. Argos makes that argument literally. A sun, or any single point of authority, has no fixed centre here. Instead, particles arrive continuously and unpredictably from everywhere at once, and the system responds to all of them equally. Gyre is a title earned by how the exhibition actually works, not applied afterwards to a set of finished objects.

The building that grew around a tree

The Korea Pavilion occupies an unusual position in the history of the Giardini. Designed by the Korean architect Kim Seok-chul and the Italian architect Franco Mancuso, and completed in 1995, it was the last permanent national pavilion built on the site, arriving nearly a century after the gardens began filling with them.

Its footprint was set by a condition rather than a preference. City conservation rules required the architects to protect the roots of an existing tree on the plot, so the building was raised on micropiles, driven just below the surface rather than dug into it, and the pavilion’s structure curves around where the tree stood. The tree itself has since died and been removed, but the building’s logic, a structure that adapts its form and its foundations to something already living on the site rather than clearing it, has remained the defining fact of the pavilion ever since. Its irregular glass wall, which floods the interior with shifting Giardini light throughout the day, is a direct consequence of that same accommodation.

The observation that connects the two

That history is what makes one decision inside Gyre worth dwelling on. To install Argos, part of the pavilion’s ceiling was opened for the first time in the building’s twenty-seven-year history, cutting a route for cosmic particles to reach the detector inside.

The same building that was engineered never to disturb what was already living beneath its floor was, for this exhibition, opened at the roof to register what falls continuously from above it. A pavilion designed around a tree’s root system and an artwork designed around a shower of subatomic particles are, in the end, asking the same question of architecture: how does a structure stay porous to a system it did not build and cannot control. The Korea Pavilion has now answered that question twice, twenty-seven years apart, once in its foundations and once in its roof, and Gyre is the exhibition that made the second answer visible.

What it felt like to move through

Visitors entered a sequence of rooms lit less by fixtures than by the works themselves: the pulse of Chroma V’s cells, the flash of Argos registering a muon, the slow silver churn of Flare, the mineral shimmer of La Poussière de Soleils seen through its lenses. Because every trigger came from an unpredictable subatomic event rather than a programmed loop, no two visits produced quite the same sequence of light and movement. The building’s own irregular glass wall added a second, slower rhythm on top of the works’ faster one, letting the day’s actual weather and light over the Giardini bleed into an exhibition ostensibly about forces far beyond the garden outside.

Lee’s curatorial framing, of a labyrinth in which stillness and motion, and the human and the nonhuman, are held in the same object, was not asking visitors to decode a thesis. It was asking them to notice that the room around them was reacting to something they could not see, continuously, for as long as they stood in it.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to describe Gyre as an art and science crossover, a familiar category that usually means an artist borrowing imagery from a laboratory. That is not what happened at the Korea Pavilion. Yunchul Kim built the instruments himself, tested them himself, and wired an entire building to respond to what they measured. The science in Gyre was not illustrated. It was operating, continuously, for the length of the show.

The pavilion gave that operation somewhere honest to happen. A building already defined by a decision to accommodate something it did not choose, a tree it could not move, opened its roof for the first time to accommodate something else it could not choose either, a shower of particles falling from space. Twenty-seven years apart, the same instinct produced both decisions.

Gyre closed in November 2022, but the argument it made about the Korea Pavilion has not. The building continues to host a new exhibition at every edition of the Biennale, each one working, in its own way, against the same irregular glass wall and the same absent tree.