Brilliant Ideas Episode #45: Kimsooja

Like a needle, which puts together two different things, Kimsooja takes a role of connecting people with different cultural backgrounds. As if by destiny, her name “sooja” means “needle” in Indian. One of her representative works, <A Needle Woman>(1999-2001) is a video artwork of performances in eight cities with eight cultural contexts. In the video, the artist is standing idly in the middle of a street where many people are passing by. The still view of her from behind that contrasts with the busy surroundings look like a needle, which is intended by the artist to make geography, culture, socio-politics, and other features of each region into temporal and spatial indexes. Here, the needle is a barometer, representing the axis. Taking a neutral position in the performance, Kimsooja also turns her body into a hermaphrodite tool embracing the nature of the real and the abstract and masculinity and femininity. Becoming the center of various cultures, she says that she felt the strong connection between the body, the mind, and the world as well as peace when she played the role of a needle.

contexts the artist experienced in Seoul, New York, and Paris have become rich artistic nourishment for her. The works of the artist also show different sides according to on what background they are displayed or where they are created. The most representative example is ‘bottari’, which made Kimsooja who she is now.
During her short residency in MoMA PS1 in New York, which was for about a year, the artist first found the meaning of ‘bottari’ as a Korean traditional subject in the foreign land. Kimsooja found in ‘bottari’ made with leftover cloth that it had “ready-made” and “ready-used” features, as well as an object with both two and three dimensional properties as it was a plane object that became a solid figure when something was wrapped inside. Therefore, the artist considered ‘bottari’ a matter that could gather everything together including the mind and the body.

In 1997, KIMSOOJA carried hundreds of Bottaris (bed sheet-like cloth used for packing personal belongings) on a truck and toured the whole of South Korea for 11 days. Since this performance, KIMSOOJA has been called as the “Bottari artist.” The artist creates a unique art world using “sound”, “light”, “bed sheets”, and her works focus on ‘people’. “Cloth” is the medium she chose to connect with people. Through the action of sewing with traditional sewing materials such as needle, thread, cloth, the artist concentrates on looking atherself and exploring issues about others, finally focuses on “self-consciousness.”
Born in 1957, Daegu, Korea, KIMSOOJA now works in Seoul, New York and Paris. She participated in the ‘Venice Biennale 2013’, ‘Whitney Biennale’ and has had many exhibitions including the exhibitions held at the Centre Pompidou, France, Miami Art Museum, MoMA PS1, New York, Vancouver Art Gallery. In 2016, she was the artist for the ‘MMCA Hyundai Motor Series’ and held a solo exhibition at the MMCA(National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea); <MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2016: KIMSOOJA – Archive of Mind>.