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Kimsooja (Korean: 김수자; born 1957) was born in Daegu, South Korean. Kim is a multi-disciplinary conceptual artist who travels between her three homes and places of work in New York, Paris, and Seoul. In 1980 Kim graduated with a B.F.A in Painting from Hong-Ik University, Seoul and continued to pursue her M.F.A there, obtaining the degree in 1984 at the age of 27. Her origin as a painter was a crucial starting point for the development of her art. That same year, Kim received a scholarship to study art at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France, where she studied Printmaking. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1988 at Gallery Hyundai, Seoul. Currently, her work is featured in countless international museums and galleries as well as public art fairs and other spaces. 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 Sowing into Painting, Wanas Konst, Sweden, Traversées\Kimsooja, Poitiers, France (2019-2020), To Breathe, Public Commission for the new metro station Mairie de Saint-Ouen in Paris (2020), 21st century new stained-glass commission for the Saint-Etienne Cathedral in Metz, France (2021), Asia Society Triennial, New York (2020). Kimsooja has exhibited in major museums and institutions around the world, including Peabody Essex Museum (2019); Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Chapel (2018-2019); Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2018); Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2017); MMCA Korea (2016); Centre Pompidou Metz (2015); Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2015); Vancouver Art Gallery (2013); Museum of Modern Art Saint-Etienne (2012); Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) (2012); Baltic Center for Contemporary Art Gateshead, UK (2009); BOZAR, Brussels (2008); Crystal Palace, Museum Reina Sofia, Spain (2006); The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2005); Kunstmuseum Palast Düsseldorf (2004); Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon (2003); PAC Milan (2003); Kunsthalle Wein (2002); Kunsthalle Bern (2001); MoMA PS1 (2001); Rodin Gallery, Leeum Samsung Museum of Fine Art (2000); ICC Tokyo (2001); and CCA Kitakyushu (1999).[1]

Kimsooja represented Korea for the 55th Venice Biennale Korean Pavilion (2013), and for the 24th São Paulo Biennale (1998), participated in Kassel Documenta 14: ANTIDORON – The EMST Collection (2017), and has taken part in international biennials and triennials: Busan (2016, 2002), Venice (2019, 2013, 2007, 2005, 2001, 1999), Gwangju (2012, 2002,1995), Moscow(2009), Istanbul (1997), Lyon(2002), and Manifesta 1 (1996) among others.

Early Life

While in University, Kimsooja discovered her love for understanding the connection of aesthetics and human psychology which lead to the motive behind many of her works. Kimsooja references, from her first work to her most recent, how humans react to fabric, paint, sculpture and more, and how we experience the world as humans. Kimsooja's "Sewing" series (1983–1992), her first work with fabric, brought forth an assemblage of systems of horizontals and verticals. Kimsooja’s use of fabric evoked bottari cloth, a traditional Korean wrapping cloth, typically made and used by women. She utilized fabric forming cruciform structures that synthesized an entangled and knotted vision of society and 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 Kimsooja's own interest in the traditional association between female labor and needlework in Korean culture along with the dynamics of civic and domestic power and the noticeable disconnect of public and private space. Growing up female in South Korea during the mid to late 1990s, Kimsooja created work that many Korean women could relate to through their collective attempts to remove themselves from the patriarchal social systems at play. With such media she intertwines tradition with contemporary art and feminism in South Korea. Kimsooja’s work forces spectators to separate the art from the artist and question humanity’s existence.

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 (obangsaek). 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 displacement and travel but also refers to concepts of wrapping and unfolding, becoming symbolic of both a home and a lack of one.

In 1992, the installation Deductive Objects, 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 favors 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 Bottari Truck in Exile (1999), made on the road as a truck heaped with piles of clothing, wrapped in silk bed covers, traveled from one location to another. Kimsooja dedicated the piece, which was presented at the Venice Biennale, to refugees of the Kosovo war.

Name

After having to pick a domain name for her personal 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 (2003). Kimsooja links this project along with sharing the importance of her name and describes this action as, "A one word name refuses gender identity, marital status, socio-political or cultural and geographical identity by not separating the family name and the first name..." Kimsooja alluded to the struggles and challenges she once faced in finding her voice and expanding her artistic vision. By adopting the single word name, she not only established herself as a “less is more” contemporary artist but also claimed her name as hers and hers alone.

References

1. Koh, Mi-seok. “Multimedia Artist Kim Soo-Ja: Sewing Life with Breath.” Koreana 26 (4): 54–57. 2012. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edo&AN=88935358&site=eds-live&scope=site.
2. Report, Mena. “United States: Hyundai Motor Presents MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2016: KimSooja - Archive of Mind.” SyndiGate Media Inc. 2016. link.gale.com/apps/doc/A461923672/AONE?u=nysl_se_bardcsl&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=409fa15c.
3. Fernandez-Gomez, Maria Rosa. “Transboundary Aesthetics in Korean Women Artists.” Universidad de Málaga. 2019. https://hdl.handle.net/10630/18350
4. Ioannides, E., Pantagoutsou, A., & Jury, H. “Contemporary Artworks as Transformational Objects in Art Psychotherapy Museum Groupwork.” The Arts in Psychotherapy, 73, 101759. 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aip.2021.101759
5. Kee, Joan. “Kimsooja.” Grove Art Online. 2005.  https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000097927.