K-ART FOCUS For Koo Jeong-a, missing is part of seeing

Koo Jeong-a makes art from what people usually fail to notice: the lingering trace of scent, a glow that emerges only after darkness falls and a crystal that flashes only when a viewer happens to stand in the right place.

Her new solo exhibition at Leeum Museum of Art, “KOO JEONG A: OUSSSMOS,” turns that preoccupation into a museum-wide experience.

On a rainy afternoon, the first challenge was simply to locate 50 crystals hidden in the dark gabion wall outside the gallery — a task that seemed designed to test whether looking is the same as seeing. In the work, titled “A Reality Upgrade & End Alone,” (2003/2026) the crystals refused to announce themselves. Only after shifting position and looking again did a small flash of light appear.

That fleeting discovery — or the possibility of never finding it at all — is integral to her work.

“Seeing is understanding,” Koo said at a press event Monday for her new exhibition. “I think seeing is knowing.” Yet the artist added that she cannot compel viewers to understand her works; she only hopes they will find their own way toward them.

Koo, 59, was born in Seoul and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Since settling in Paris in the 1990s, she has moved between cities and mediums — drawings, sculpture, installation, film, sound, animation, augmented reality and architecture — while describing herself as someone who “lives and works everywhere.”

The artist, who has long kept her personal life largely out of public view, has a quiet, enigmatic presence and a fondness for inventing playful terms by combining familiar words. Museum staff who worked with her described Koo a far warmer and more charming collaborator than her reserved public presence might suggest — an artist who speaks sparingly and often communicates her ideas more readily through drawings than words.

She gained wider international attention for “ OTRO,” a fully functioning glow-in-the-dark skatepark completed in 2012 on Ile de Vassiviere in central France, where she transformed public recreation into a communal, after-dark sensory experience.

In 2024, Koo was the lead artist representing the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with “ODORAMA CITIES,” which used 17 fragrances distilled from more than 600 personal scent-memories to construct an olfactory portrait of Korea and a plural, transnational sense of Korean identity.

Her materials and scale have transformed radically over the three decades, from sugar cubes and mechanical pencil leads to scent, magnets, glow-in-the-dark skate parks and a nearly 6-ton stainless steel structure.

However, the central question has remained: How might people notice what familiarity has taught them to pass by?

At the heart of the exhibition is “MOBIOUSSS” (2026), an 8-meter-wide steel work commissioned for Leeum. At eye level, it resembles a maze of interconnected tunnels; seen from above, it resolves into an infinity symbol.

Its title combines the name of mathematician August Mobius with “OUSSS,” Koo’s invented term that can shift between a sound, prefix and suffix without settling into a fixed definition.

The massive work is paired with “UNTITLED” (1998), a nearly imperceptible arrangement of 57 mechanical-pencil leads standing against a small wall. The slender structure seems so vulnerable that the slightest touch or a blow of air could scatter it. Another work in the show is her early sugar-cube house structure assembled without adhesive, its broken-off fragments retained as part of a small landscape.

The contrast invites a deceptively simple question: Is the larger object necessarily stronger, and the smaller one necessarily fragile?

Koo resists such fixed readings. The sugar cubes and pencil leads may be physically delicate, she said, but they are also products of highly organized industrial systems. “They are materially fragile, but they are objects made within a very strong system,” she said.

The same ambiguity runs through her pairing of rough rocks and luminous crystals.

Both are materials formed from the earth, but their appearance and cultural values appear radically different. Koo is interested in how crystals, once understood as rare and precious, can now be manufactured at industrial scale in laboratories — and how neither fragility and nor preciousness is a permanent property.

The show also withholds as much as it presents.

“R” (2005), comprising 1,001 drawings and 77 wooden boxes, is shown in its entirety for the first time — but no viewer can see all 1,001 drawings at once. Some are hung while the rest remain in the wooden boxes distributed across three spaces. The displayed drawings rotate periodically during the exhibition. Here, incompleteness is not a deficiency but a condition of encounter.

Kim Sung-won, Leeum’s deputy director and chief curator of the exhibition, described this as Koo’s “right to miss.”

“Missing something has the same value as seeing it,” Kim said. “When we realize what we have missed, we may gain even more.”

Kim said Koo’s sustained importance lies in her refusal of a culture that prizes speedy images, spectacle and immediate explanation. Her practice, she said, poses a question about the possibility of accepting what is not fully explained or understood.

“In an age of speed and spectacle, her work proposes time in which we can remain,” she said.

The exhibition runs from Saturday through Dec. 27.