Kimsooja

As you enter the Vancouver Art Gallery rotunda and mount the marble staircase to the second floor, you encounter Kimsooja’s installation, Lotus Zone of Zero. Adapted to fit within this specific space, it consists of a floating ceiling of Korean temple lanterns in the shape of lotus blossoms, and a soundtrack composed of chants from three different religious traditions, Buddhist, Christian and Islamic. These prayerful sounds, twining upward towards the rotunda’s neo-classical dome, is extremely moving. Originally conceived by Kimsooja in response to the Iraq war, the installation’s visual and aural components communicate an ongoing and idealistic longing to bring disparate religious and cultural groups together in a state of what she calls “harmonious coexistence.”

Surprisingly, given Kimsooja’s soaring international reputation, her hundreds of exhibitions and installations from Cologne and Chicago to Tokyo and Beijing, and her representation of Korea at the 2013 Venice Biennale, the VAG is the first institution to bring her work together in a comprehensive survey. The 30-year retrospective for the 56-year old artist, who is based in New York, Paris and Seoul, demonstrates not only the evolution of her art-making but also the coherence of her themes, materials and strategies. These are manifest from her early wall-mounted works, composed of hand-stitched fragments of found fabric; through her revelatory installations of bottari, the large fabric bundles which draw on the Korean tradition of using bed covers to wrap and transport clothing and other household items from place to place; to her visually and emotionally sumptuous deployment of photography, performance and video.

Born in the South Korean city of Daegu, Kimsooja had a geographically unsettled childhood: her father was in the military and the family moved frequently from place to place, sometimes finding themselves dangerously close to the DMZ (the Korean Demilitarized Zone). This formative experience replays in her art as a recurring feeling of dislocation, a sympathy with the experience of migration and the condition of exile. Even more significant than the specificities of place and culture, however, is Kimsooja’s preoccupation with what she calls “the dimension of pure humanity”—a preoccupation that is implicit in her textile works and explicit in her performance videos.

Kimsooja studied art at Hongik University in Seoul, graduating in 1980 with an MFA. In 1983 she shifted her focus from painting and printmaking to textile-based art, cutting up found fabric and sewing the pieces into geometric configurations that explore a range of formal and thematic concerns. These include horizontality and verticality, the nature and treatment of the surface, and the relationship of these elements on the one hand to the act of painting, and on the other to ideas of yin and yang and the configuration of the human body as symbolized through the archetype of the cross. The Earth and the Heaven, 1984, is exemplary in its use of ragged-edged square and rectangular pieces of found fabric, sewn together with irregular stitches into the overall form of a large, wall-mounted cross. The fabrics bear the unwritten histories of the bodies they once enfolded as clothing or bedcovers, and the hand-stitching adds an additional and important element of humanity. And while the colours, patterns and tactility of Kimsooja’s textile art are immensely appealing, I also responded to her subversive act of substituting layered and stitched pieces of fabric for paint and canvas. This body of work functions as an unspoken feminist counterpart to male-dominated, late-modernist abstraction. Part of the artist’s breakthrough was piercing the cloth surface with a needle rather than playing over it with a paintbrush. Kimsooja has talked about a revelatory moment in 1983 when she was mending a bedcover with her mother. The humble domestic act of darning— of pushing the needle in and out of the silky, brightly coloured fabric— climaxed in a creative epiphany. “I had an exhilarant, thrilling moment,” she told me, “as if the whole…of the universe was hitting my head, passing through my body and hands, to the point where the fabric meets the needle.” Her true vocation—modest yet powerful, “intimate yet astonishing”—seems to have been born in that moment.

In the late 1980s, Kimsooja began wrapping ordinary found objects with pieces of fabric as a means of (paradoxically) revealing their essence and “reconfirming their structure.” Her resulting series of Deductive Objects incorporates humble and broken tools and furniture found in both Korea and the United States, including a pitchfork, a rake, a milk crate, a stool, a drying rack and a wooden ladder. In binding or draping these things with torn strips of dark and brightly coloured cloth, the artist has treated them with the most tender regard, almost as if she were bandaging a child’s foot or finger. The results are unexpectedly affecting.

As the show reveals, another important revelation (and transition) occurred in 1992, during Kimsooja’s residency at the Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 space in Long Island City, NY. This was when and where she began making and installing bottari, the objects that garnered her immediate and widespread critical and curatorial attention. Although bottari are ubiquitous in Korean domestic life, it was when Kimsooja first placed a bundle in her PS1 studio that she understood its creative possibilities, as both a wrapped canvas and a sculpture.

Kimsooja has since worked very successfully in other media and materials, but bottari have become synonymous with her practice. In 1997, she filled the back of an old truck with fabric bundles and set off on an 11-day journey through Korea, revisiting the sites of her many childhood homes. A recreation of the bundle-filled truck is on display at the VAG, near a projection of Cities on the Move – 2727 Kilometer Bottari Truck, Kimsooja’s video of the original project. In this work, she is filmed from behind, sitting upright atop the bundles strapped into the back of the truck as it passes through a range of landscapes and weather conditions. Her uprightness suggests not only an element of monkish discipline and rectitude but also the idea of her body as a needle, “connecting the past with the present and future.”

The body-needle metaphor is explicitly re-enacted in the eightchannel video, A Needle Woman, 1999–2001. Shot in Tokyo, New York, London, Mexico City, Cairo, Delhi, Shanghai and Lagos, it documents Kimsooja’s performances at the centre of these great, teeming cities. In each, she stands silent and unmoving in the middle of a busy thoroughfare as crowds of people walk endlessly, unremarkably past her. Again, her back is towards us. As is true in many of her videotaped performances, her long black hair is pulled into a ponytail and she is clothed in a plain, grey cotton garment— a humble and unadorned robe suggestive of a religious calling. She could be a nun, a mendicant, a postulant or a pilgrim. As the needle of the work’s title, however, she stitches together heaven and earth and thronging humanity. Her decision that her performance be shot from behind was a way of maintaining a kind of anonymity, presenting herself, she says, as “a neutral pole—an axis of time and space.” At the same time there is an acute awareness of Kimsooja’s relationship to the people on the street, her body not simply an axis but a kind of monitor of the waves of humanity that pass by her.

As I left Kimsooja’s exhibition, I encountered a small choir or chanting group practising in the rotunda. Their deep, sustained humming and sonorous exhalations gorgeously complemented the recorded Tibetan Buddhist, Gregorian and Islamic chants of Lotus Zone of Zero. It was an entirely harmonious conjunction of expressions, a coming-together of beliefs—and it felt exactly right. ❚

“Kimsooja Unfolding” was exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery from October 11, 2013 to January 26, 2014.

Robin Laurence is a Vancouver-based writer, curator and Contributing Editor to Border Crossings.