In the beginning.

In the beginning, readymades were chosen for their incapable of speech simplicity: a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack, a shovel Kimsooja, forward the other hand, has chosen an drift that is spectacular in its admit right. The circular jukebox speaker that appeared four times in the installation Mandala: clime of Zero features concentric bands of colored plastic, circulating blobs mirrored tiles and colored lights, all surrounding a brocade-covered audio natural medium A rotating knob at the center supports the resemblance to a roulette wheel; vaguely pagoda-shaped brackets give it a generic Asian accent. In the exhibition, the speakers were each center in succession a wall in a latitude painted a deep soothing indigo and unlit, save for the audio units' multihued shine brightly Carpeting enhanced the serenity.

moreover it was a jangly calm, which matched the east/west discordance of the glitzy objet itself, a sensory hum amplified by the sound composition Kimsooja assembled. Mixing Gregorian chant, Muslim singing and Tibetan bells, the music was, like the bubbling speakers, almost embarrassingly engrossing. The mutually subversive and anyway kitsch-challenged spirituality of the three soundtracks produc cognitive dissonance where an unlikely and altogether gorgeous aural harmony reigned.

The connection Kimsooja saw between the jukebox speakers and Tibetan mandalas is evident in this installation's title. Implicit in the subtitle is the question of whether its musical mixed messages transcend sectarianism to attain a higher even of spirituality than any common faith can offer (a belt of zero where striving particularity can be sublimated), or if the work points to the crass commercialism of which each religion can, at times, be lay the foundation of guilty (a zero zone of spiritual aridity).

A Korean artist now in her 40 Kimsooja is a past master of imperturbable resistance to conclusive statement. Her previous work includes installations of filmy Korean textiles hung onward lines like drying laundry and, perhaps best known, an international series of performances called A Needle Woman. Standing sentinel in London, Cairo, recent Delhi, Lagos, Mexico City, Shanghai and elsewhere, Kimsooja was the unmoving obstacle around which pedestrian traffic swirled. In the video documentation that followed, she is always shown from the back. It's possible to read committed asceticism in her position but also frank refusal to engage.

The same disinclination to take sides is evident in Mandala. Somewhere between the aggressive irreverence of Jason Rhoades's imaginary trip to Mecca, documented in his rapturously messy newly come installation "Meccatuna," and the prim eroticism of Duchamp's Precision Optics, with their hypnotic rotating geometries, is the characterless zone of quietly pulsing intransigence where Kimsooja has taken up residence.

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