KOO JEONG A: LAND OF OUSSS [GRAVITTA] at Kunsthaus Bregenz (31 January – 25 May 2026) is a site-specific solo exhibition by the Korean artist (b. 1967), who represented South Korea at the 2024 Venice Biennale. The show transforms the building’s floors into a sequence of sensory and perceptual experiences, engaging light, materiality, movement, scent, and invisible forces. On the ground floor, a large phosphorescent floor sculpture—a curved fragment resembling an unusable skatepark ramp—evokes imagined motion and draws on minimalist traditions while interacting with Peter Zumthor’s architecture. The first upper floor introduces olfactory elements with hidden Swiss stone pine wood emitting scent, alongside heavy ring-shaped wooden objects referencing Möbius strips and concrete art, plus a phosphorescent star painting. The second floor features wall-mounted magnet compositions that form force fields, highlighting physical and energetic relationships influenced by geomantic concepts. The top floor presents a looped film depicting a static scene with a glowing gaseous form, suggesting timeless duration in a dreamlike “Ousss” realm.The exhibition emphasizes presence over narrative, subtle phenomena, and multisensory perception, with darkened lower and upper levels contrasting diffuse middle light.
KOO JEONG A: LAND OF OUSSS [ GRAVITTA ] / Solo exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria. Vernissage, January 30, 2026.
View also our coverage of Koo Jeong A’s exhibition Kangse X that is running concurrently at the gallery Hauser & Wirth in Zürich.
KOO JEONG A (b. 1967, Seoul) lives and works “everywhere”. In 2024 KOO JEONG A represented South Korea at the 60th Venice Biennale. KOO JEONG A’s most significant exhibitions include OooOoO at the Malmö Konsthall and Dance with Demons at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, both in 2024, [YONG DONG] at Pilar Corrias in London in 2022, KOO JEONG A at the Galerie Eva Presenhuber in New York and It’s Urgent! at LUMA Arles, both in 2020, OooOoO at the Milan Triennial in 2019, and 16:07 at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 2012. In 2025–2026 KOO JEONG A’s exhibition LAND OF OUSSS [KANGSE] is on view at LUMA Arles, and the installation HAUS DER MAGNET at Haus der Kunst in Munich.
Press Release (excerpt)
KOO JEONG A’s rooms are not stages but zones of permeability and refined phenomena, as is also evident in their works involving electromagnetic fields.
KOO JEONG A directs our gaze to the incidental, to the marginal zones of experience that are first noticed after patient observation. Invisible phenomena can be experienced through sounds, smells, and minimal gestures. The invented and found, concrete and intangible slide into one another devoid of fixed boundaries. At the same time, KOO JEONG A’s work is characterized by extraordinary restraint. Just a few, precisely arranged elements are enough to generate a presence. In this respect, Kunsthaus Bregenz becomes an ideal sounding board. Its size and expansiveness allow the scarcely visible, the subtle, the just barely perceptible to come into its own.
For the ground floor of Kunsthaus Bregenz, KOO JEONG A is developing a floor object, a fragment of a skatepark taken out of context, its phosphorescent surface glowing in the dark. The sculpture extends as a sweeping curve that reorders the exhibition area. In dialogue with Peter Zumthor’s architecture, a space emerges that allows the material, light, and movement to be experienced aesthetically and poetically. As with the artist’s earlier skateparks—in connection with the Biennale in Venice in 2024, the Triennale in Milan in 2019, as well as exhibitions in Arles, Liverpool, São Paulo, and Seoul—KOO JEONG A’s use of the track’s curve takes the form of a Möbius strip at Kunsthaus Bregenz too. Here it appears as a sculpture developed specifically for the site, precisely formulated, and integrated into the spatial atmosphere.
A significant subject for KOO JEONG A is the exploration of phenomena that are located at or beyond the threshold of human perception. Displayed on one of the upper floors are wall objects that, composed of magnets, are affixed to the walls via swivel mounts. They float like powerful, metal paravents in front of the corners of the room, making us aware that there are forces at work that remain invisible to the naked eye.
Another floor is dedicated to scent. In 2024, KOO JEONG A developed a perfume with the Korean fragrance label NONFICTION for ODORAMA CITIES in the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Now, a space for olfactory perception is also opening up in Bregenz, for the invisible, for that which can only be perceived by the senses.
Shown on the top floor is a film, surrounded by a multitude of greenish fluorescent stars, luminescent emblems of the cosmos, hinting at vastness and infinity.
KOO JEONG A’s installations aren’t stages or narratives; instead, they create atmospheres of permeability, spaces of energetic shifts and refined phenomena. The works come alive not through meaning or interpretation but through presence, coherence, and hidden albeit clearly perceptible energy.
Exhibition Text (translated from German):
Ground Floor
A line traverses the space, stretched wide and with a calm, self-evident sweep. It is a sculptural placement, monumental due to its extension and yet restrained in its effect, determined and gestural. What is shown on the ground floor of Kunsthaus Bregenz is less an object than a spatial drawing, a lineation that does not occupy the space but sovereignly leads through it. This line, actually a floor relief, rises at its ends from the floor, follows a uniform curve, and sinks back down in the middle. It is a section and fragment, part of a larger, only imagined context.
It recalls the floor sculptures of Minimalism, those objects that do not appear as bodies but as placements in space. Minimalism understands sculptural objects not as carriers of inner meaning or mimetic reproduction, but as relations. Form, material, and gesture are reduced to the bare essentials in order, in turn, to release the effect of perception.
This effect becomes particularly evident in the architecture of Peter Zumthor. The sweep is a movable, elastic element against the rigidity of architectural statics. In [ GRAVITTA ], its sparseness conveys a certain resistance as well as an austerity of expression. In a present where art often relies on narrative, identity, or various forms of realism, such a reduced formal language feels almost alien. Media, surrealist, or documentary realisms work with images, stories, recognizable references. They generate meaning through representation. This space, by contrast, refuses presentation. It refuses illustration as much as narration.
And yet a reality is at work here—not in the sense of objectivity or visual identifiability, but in presence. It is about forces, tensions, transitions. About phenomena we know from physics, about energy and vibrations. Perception moves here between the measurable and the unavailable, between the obvious and the barely nameable.
In this sense, the large arc must also be understood. It is part of an imagined skatepark, a motif that KOO JEONG A has realized multiple times, for example in Milan in the outdoor space of a park or recently at Haus der Kunst in Munich. In Bregenz, the track is not usable. Precisely because of this, it withdraws from functional readability. Movement does not take place; it is imagined. The eye follows the line, anticipates a ride without carrying it out. The sculpture generates an idea of mobility without being kinetic itself.
But the most important thing is the enigmatic light. The sculpture glows from within in a phosphorescent greenish yellow. It absorbs light and releases it with a time delay, absorbing the environment and at the same time human perception.
First Floor
On the first upper floor, attention shifts. The space is illuminated and present as a whole. Here, too, visibility becomes the theme. KOO JEONG A also brings the sense of smell into play. Already in the pavilion in Venice in 2024, KOO JEONG A relied on smells; they were sampled then, a portrait of Korea, a mélange of memory, an olfactory geography.
Smells are closely linked to memory and affect. They do not work through resonance. KOO JEONG A works with this quality without showing the source of the smell itself. In Kunsthaus Bregenz, Swiss stone pine wood is used, an intensely fragrant wood from the Alpine region. It remains hidden, set into floor joints and ventilation slits. The air brushes over it, the scent spreads through the space. Perception occurs without a visible object. It is an effect without localization. Smells are fleeting, they have no clear contour, no fixed place. They can hardly be focused and are difficult to name.
On the floor lie three ring-shaped wooden works. They are precisely cut circles with clear edges, similar to the arc on the ground floor, yet closed in themselves, solid, and each weighing half a ton. One work is unpainted, one is white-glazed, a third appears as if made of plaster. These objects also refer to the floor sculptures of Minimal Art, but also to concrete art, for instance Max Bill’s endless loops. KOO JEONG A lives in London and, for some time now, also in Switzerland. Max Bill, the Zurich Concrete artist, made loops from stone and metal. For him, it was about mathematical clarity and formal harmony. With KOO JEONG A, other horizons open—it is about a mental reenactment, about movements that take place in perception and set it into vibration.
The Möbius strip has only one surface, one edge, no beginning and no end. In Western contexts, it has mostly been read mathematically. In East Asian thought traditions, by contrast, it stands for circularity, for the interpenetration of inside and outside, of becoming and passing away. Time here does not appear as a linear sequence but as a continuous present, as an attempt at visual and mental balance.
There is also a painting hanging in this room: [SEVEN STARS] takes up the thoughts of impregnated air, light, and infinity. On a monochromatic surface, a few stars are inscribed in pale color; the pastel is phosphorescent and makes the ambient light glow.
Second Floor
On the second upper floor, the same genres appear, but with different materials. Alongside phenomenology and mathematics comes physics. In front of the walls are paintings in various sizes. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that they are composed of a multitude of elements. The individual parts shimmer anthracite. They are built from magnets.
From a distance, the building blocks look like a grid or pixels; up close, their stackings and geometric order become visible.
These surfaces bear traces: there are shiny points, impurities, lines, irregularities, as if they had been hand-cut. These works, too, depict nothing. The paintings resemble a mosaic, not least recalling the organizational forms of concrete art. The surfaces form force fields that together create an image, a presence that acts physically—on bodies, mechanical and digital devices. The magnetic elements on this floor make tangible this relationship between object and space, material and energy, between presence. The space becomes an experience of fields of effect that influence not only visitors but also one another. Art here becomes a form of tuning. It appears charged, in the form of punctual energy centers that are equally present and minimally placed. Magnetism here is not only to be understood as a physical phenomenon but also as a figure of thought for invisible bonds. In Korean contexts, this is connected with geomantic ideas such as Pungsu-jiri, which proceeds from energetic fields in landscape and architecture.
Third Floor
On the top floor, a film is on view. A crouching back figure sits on a meadow, in front of it a glowing, gaseous body. It is twilight. The camera slowly zooms into the scene and out again, as if night did not follow day but time could also flow backward. The movement is minimal. What changes is the gaze and the idea that events can be retroactive.
The loop thereby generates a form of time that consciously withdraws from narration and reality. We find ourselves in a post-apocalyptic or simply fictional, dream-soaked world, in the world of “Ousss.” There is no progression, no event in the ordinary sense. Instead, the feeling arises of a duration, a stretching, an eventless lingering. The gaseous ball rises like a huge source of energy, as a counterpart without fixed contour.
With the filmic image, the dramaturgy of the exhibition concludes. Again, it is about presence without objectivity, about reality as appearance, about effect more than image. The spatial sequence of Kunsthaus Bregenz reinforces the dimensions of this experience. The ground floor and top floor are darkened, the middle levels characterized by diffuse light. The building itself becomes part of the placement, not as a shell but as a space of attunement and resonance.
Thomas D. Trummer, Bregenz, January 28, 2026
