Kimsooja


Kimsooja is a South Korean, multi-disciplinary conceptual artist based in New York, Paris, and Seoul. Her practice combines performance, film, photo, and site-specific installation using textile, light, and sound. Kimsooja’s work investigates questions concerning the conditions of humanity, while engaging issues of aesthetics, culture, politics, and the environment. Her principle of ‘non-doing’ and ‘non-making,’ which follows a conceptual and structural investigation of performance through modes of mobility and immobility, inverts the notion of the artist as the predominant actor.
Kimsooja's recent major projects include Traversées\Kimsooja, Poitiers, France, To Breathe, Public Commission for the new metro station Mairie de Saint-Ouen in Paris, 21st century new stained-glass commission for the Saint-Etienne Cathedral in Metz, France, Asia Society Triennial, New York. Kimsooja has exhibited in major museums and institutions around the world, including Peabody Essex Museum ; Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Chapel ; Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts ; Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein ; MMCA Korea ; Centre Pompidou Metz ; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao ; Vancouver Art Gallery ; Museum of Modern Art Saint-Etienne ; Pérez Art Museum Miami ; Baltic Center for Contemporary Art Gateshead, UK ; BOZAR, Brussels ; Crystal Palace, Museum Reina Sofia, Spain ; The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens ; Kunstmuseum Palast Dusseldorf ; Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon ; PAC Milan ; Kunsthalle Wein ; Kunsthalle Bern ; MoMA PS1 ; Rodin Gallery, Leeum Samsung Museum of Fine Art ; ICC Tokyo ; and CCA Kitakyushu.
Kimsooja represented Korea for the 55th Venice Biennale Korean Pavilion, and for the 24th São Paulo Biennale, participated in Kassel Documenta 14: ANTIDORON – The EMST Collection, and has taken part in international biennials and triennials: Busan, Venice, Gwangju, Moscow, Istanbul, Lyon, and Manifesta 1 among others.

Name

After having to pick a domain name for her website, Kimsooja thought about the conceptual implications of combining her name into one word. She commemorated this act in a conceptual piece titled A One-Word Name Is An Anarchist's Name.

Early career

Kimsooja was born in Daegu, South Korea, in 1957. She studied Western painting at the Hongik University in Seoul and her origin as a painter was a crucial starting point for the development of her art. Kimsooja's "Sewing" series, her first work with fabric, brought forth an assemblage of fabric forming cruciform structures that synthesized an entangled and knotted vision of the world into a system of horizontals and verticals. Like the Spatialist painter Lucio Fontana, who pierced the uni-colored canvas with a sharped-edged dagger, Kimsooja also made art that was no longer a screen of illusion but a three-dimensional structure as she weaved through the surface of the work, piercing holes into it. These early sewn works, in turn, were inspired by the fabric and clothes that her grandmother had owned, while also fueled by Kimmsoja’s own interest in the traditional association between female labour and needlework in Korean culture.
Subsequent to a residency at MoMA PS1 in 1992-93, Kimsooja initiated a series of site-specific installations that found their origin in the Korean color spectrum. She created sculptures inspired from Korean bedcover cloth bundles that are associated in Korean culture with travel and migration, and may also be interpreted in her work as an allusion to restrictions on female activities. These bedcover bundles inspired the title of a number of sculptures and installation works that Kimsooja titled after the Korean word, bottari, that intimates the idea of travel but also refers to concepts of wrapping and unfolding.
In 1992, the installation ', shown at MoMA PS1, took up an entire brick wall where small torn pieces of used Korean bedcover fabric were inserted by the artist in tiny holes between the bricks. The sculptural elements alongside the wall installation were composed of everyday objects wrapped in Bottari cloth, such as a carrier, a doorframe, a hook, a saw, a spool, a shovel, a clothing rack, or a ladder. While any kind of fabric can be used to make bottari, Kimsooja favours second-hand clothes to allude to the passage of time and the objects’ previous life before they were transformed into works of art.
The bottari and the act of travel continue to be central themes for her work ', made on the road as a truck heaped with piles of clothing, wrapped in silk bedcovers, travelled from one location to another. Kimsooja dedicated the piece, which was presented at the Venice Biennale, to refugees of the Kosovo war.

Performance and Video Works

Early performance and video works

In the artist's first video performance, Sewing into Walking-Kyungju, Kimsooja is seen atop the valleys of Gwangju, South Korea, picking up scattered bedcovers on the valley's floor and wrapping them into a bundle. A year later, the artist returned to the valley for the first Gwangju Biennale in Korea and scattered various clothes made of traditional Korean fabrics on the ground of a forest. This installation, made of 2.5 tons of second-hand clothes and entitled Sewing into Walking- Dedicated to the victims of Kwangju, commemorated the victims of the suppression of a democratic protest in Gwangju in 1980. This work established an analogy between the structure of fabric and that of the land, which was of particular importance in terms of confirming the three-dimensionality and spatial topology of fabric in the artist's work, as well as establishing her body in performance as a needle that weaves through the fabric of humanity and nature.

Cities on the Move: 2727km Bottari Truck and Bottari Truck - Migrateurs

In Cities on the Move – 2727 km Bottari Truck, Kimsooja sits atop a mound of bottari being transported across the country. Documenting part of her 11-day performance on her journey to places she resided before she made a cultural exile from Korea to New York at the end of the 1990s.
In 2007, Kimsooja records her performance in Paris, where she contemplates our reality of constant migration in a global society that drives us as migrateurs of every society we come from and are heading toward. The Bottari Truck - Migrateurs was made of local immigrants’ bedcovers and used clothing donated from all over Paris that was loaded on top of an old French Peugeot pick-up truck. Kim started from ‘Place de la Liberation’ where Musée MAC/VAL, which commissioned the piece, is located, and at the same time which is just on the border of south east of Paris, where many immigrants from China, the Middle East, Africa and Europe live. She moves on to different neighborhoods of Paris, which signifies the history of immigrants in France: Ivry, Place d’Italy, Bastille, Place de la Republic, Canal Saint-Martin, Gare du Nord, Goutte d’Or, to the destination ‘Église Saint-Bernard’, where most of the illegal immigrants settled down and protested their right to live in France in 1996; that has became a big political issue in French society.

A Needle Woman

In 1999, Kimsooja presented her most iconic work: A Needle Woman, a performance video piece that premiered at CCA Kitakyushu and further evolved in subsequent showings as a multi-channel video projection. In A Needle Woman, the artist is seen with her back facing the camera, wearing precisely the same clothes and standing precisely the same way in various metropolises: Tokyo, Shanghai, Delhi, New York, Mexico City, Cairo, Lagos, London, Patan, Nepal ; and in a second series of performances: Havana, Cuba; N’Djamena, Chad; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Sana’a, Yemen; and Jerusalem. Some locations visited in the work are places of violence, disrepair, or unresolved conflict, lending to the needle a metaphoric function as an instrument of healing. Also in A Laundry Woman, a performance video piece shot in India, Kimsooja is seen immobile and standing in front of a river where debris seemingly drift. A Needle Woman and A Laundry Woman exposed the artist's stances on non-doing and immobility as a form of art practice; specifically, lending to the action of immobility the virtue of inverting an audience's linear perception of space and time. The first version of A Needle Woman presented the artist laying horizontally on a rock and it established nature and spatial orientation as a central subject in her work. As well, her use of the Korean color spectrum, in which each color stands for a cardinal direction in Korean tradition, took up great importance.

Other video and film works

For A Mirror Woman: The Sun and The Moon, commissioned by the Shiseido Art Foundation in 2008, Kimsooja filmed the sun setting and the moon rising along the beach of Goa, India. The artist then digitally layered an eclipse, in which the footage of the Sun and the Moon were fused together.
In Earth – Water – Fire – Air, a multi-channel video projection that premiered at the 2009 Lanzarote Biennale, Spain, the fusion of basic elements was grasped live by the artist on the Island of Lanzarote in the Canary Island, Guatemala, and Greenland. Here, the concept of fusion enhanced the idea of earlier experiments in immobility, continually incarnated in the artist's persistent representation of permanence and impermanence, horizontal and vertical structures, the forward and backward movements of sewing.
Starting in 2010, Kimsooja initiated a 16mm film project entitled Thread Routes. Divided into six chapters, the series unfolds as an anthropological poem that takes the act of threading as a central subject. It takes place in six different cultural zones around the world, its six preliminary chapters shot in Peru, Europe, India, China, North America, and North Africa.
To Breathe: Invisible Mirror/ Invisible Needle, which premiered at La Fenice, Venice in 2006, was a nine-minute video projection of a color spectrum that filled the entirety of the theater's stage. A five-channel audio track entitled The Weaving Factory accompanied the piece, forming a couplet of inhalation and exhalation of the artist's own breathing that became increasingly less agile as the color spectrum continued its gestation.

Site-specific installations

Over the last two decades, Kimsooja has developed works that uses lights and color–in parallel to Obangseak color spectrum, which represents 5 cardinal directionality in Korean philosophy–in response to many historical and modern buildings.
A Lighthouse Woman was a site-specific installation where Kimsooja used light, color, and sound to transform the abandoned lighthouse in Morris Island for the 2002 Spoleto Festival. A Lighthouse Woman inaugurated a series of work the artist created as memorial projects that includes: Sewing Into Walking - Dedicated to the victims of Kwangju ; Planted Names ; Mandala: Chant for Auschwitz ; and A Mirror Woman: The Ground of Nowhere. Another commemorative work, Kimsooja's An Album: Hudson Guild, is a video project created in collaboration with the Hudson Guild Senior Center in Chelsea, New York, in 2009.
To Breathe – A Mirror Woman, was developed for the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid in 2006, was a mirror installation that covered the flooring of the Palacio. The entire cupola of the palace was covered with a translucent film that diffracted daylight and the Palacio was also replete with the sound of the artist's breathing.
In Lotus: Zone of Zero was first installed at :fr:Palais Rameau|Palais Rameau, Lille, Kimsooja hung six rows of concentric circles consisting of 384 temple lanterns in the shape of lotus blossoms from the glass pavilion. Six speakers aligned the circle simultaneously played Gregorian, Tibetan, and Islamic chants, which echoed throughout the room and united at the hollow center. According to Kimsooja, this is the realm of "Zero," in which different faiths form a harmonious union that transcends into a space for meditation and contemplation. The many lanterns hung overhead were meant to humble the viewer and remind them of their relationship with their community. Kimsooja created Lotus: Zone of Zero in response to the Iraq War; she wanted to create a place where different religions and people of different cultures could live in a state of harmonious coexistence.
Kimsooja represented Korea for the South Korean pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. For the piece entitled To Breathe: Bottari, Kimsooja wrapped the entirety of the national pavilion's interior with a translucent film that diffracted daylight, showering the internal structure with spectrums of light. Her sound piece The Weaving Factory also filled the pavilion with the sound of the artist inhaling and exhaling. These aspects of light and sound were further heightened by To Breathe: Blackout, an anechoic chamber where the audience would be cast in complete darkness and devoid of sound except for that of the viewer's own body.
Other notable public commissions include: A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir, a monumental 46-foot-tall sculpture commissioned and installed for the Cornell Council for the Arts 2014 Biennial on the campus of Cornell University; and Mandala: Zone of Zero, which premiered at The Project in New York City in 2003 and consisted of the sound of Tibetan, Gregorian, and Islamic chants animating a large target-shaped jukebox.
In 2019, Kimsooja takes over the City of Poitiers for the first edition of Traversées, a new international artistic and cultural event, closely linked to the fate of a major landmark, the Palace of the Dukes of Aquitaine, and its surrounding district, the heart of the city’s history and heritage. For , curated by the artistic directors Emma Lavigne and Emmanuelle de Montgazon, the artist presented more than a dozen specific installations within the historic monuments of the city, including Archive of Mind, To Breathe, To Breathe - The Flags, and Bottari 1999-2019 consisting in a shipping container painted using Obangseak colors and filled with the artist's personal belongings, accumulated in her New York apartment over twenty years. Kimsooja wraps her belongings in a container, and transports them from one continent to another, a metaphor for her perpetual nomadic Bottari.
In 2020, Kimsooja is the first contemporary artist of the 21st century to have been commissioned permanent stained glasses for the Metz Cathedral in France.

Exhibitions (selection)