“My conceptual art position started from the moment I conceptualized my body as a needle,” Kimsooja tells Observer. This idea can be traced back to her walking performance video Sewing into Walking (1994). At the time, she didn’t describe herself as a conceptual artist—nor did she anticipate how far and deep the practice would carry her. “I didn’t make any distinctive description, but that happened when I was just doing a daily practice of installing bed cover fabrics in the valley, and then at the end, I collected them on my shoulder and arms. That was a traditional kind of a transformative form of fabric that was three-dimensional and fluid, which gives a different status of a painting surface. While I was walking around the valley, I discovered my body as a symbolic needle that weaves the fabric of nature.”
When Kimsooja reviewed the video documentation, she also realized that, for her, the video screen itself—or even the camera lens—could function as a kind of wrapping method rather than merely capturing images. That was the first time she conceptualized video-making as a process of taking and unwrapping immateriality into the video screen. Meanwhile, her notion of the body as a symbolic needle came from objectively observing herself moving through nature. That was the first conceptualization happening in her practice. Since that initial realization, she has continued to view bodily movement through that framework of the needle, particularly in her A Needle Woman performance video series, produced between 1999 and 2009 in various formats: one as an eight-channel real-time video documentation and another in slow motion for the 2005 Venice Biennale, in which she focused on cities marked by conflict and instability in the wake of the Iran-Iraq war.
The first video focused on metropolises and space. Back then, Kimsooja was more interested in engaging with humanity around the world and exploring her body as an axis of space that differentiates and demonstrates the differences across regions. A subsequent 2005 work was very different: it explored notions of time, using her body as a zero point in slow motion that contextualized the audience’s bodies, reactions and movements.
Kimsooja’s concept has also evolved—from the needle to the mirror and the breath. Today, she relates the needle to space and eternity. “A needle point has a location but no physical occupation; it was very interesting for me to open up a new space when I think of the needle’s point,” she says. When she performed A Laundry Woman (2001/2007) in the Yamuna River, India, she suddenly felt confused. “I was so focused, almost like the point of a needle. I was thinking about whether the river was flowing past my body or it was my body that was moving across the river.”
The mirror, on the other hand, is a reflector that shows everything in front of it but not itself, which raised more questions that inspired Kimsooja to experiment with different performances and film projects, employing her gaze as another way of manifesting the needle in the world. In this way, she explores relationships and juxtaposition in the cultural world and the performative element of textile making, as well as local communities, garments, decorations and architectural forms.
“My early practice as a painter was always about the passion on the surface of the canvas,” Kimsooja says. “The canvas itself might not be the point of conceptualization, but it was kind of the source of conceptualization. The fundamental question for me as a painter involved interrogating the boundaries and barriers between the self and other relationships. Painters always experience confrontation in front of the canvas. I connected sewing to painting by piercing into that canvas barrier to see how the surface connects the self with the other.”
Canvas, after all, is fabric, and Kimsooja has been experimenting with and pondering its vertical and horizontal structure since she became an artist. “I see all the inner structure of the world, our language, our lifestyle, our psychological state and even architecture and furniture—all of this has this kind of cross-shaped basic structure.”
Kimsooja’s conceptualization practice also includes the making of site-specific work, which began with her interest in responding relationally to space. She is particularly drawn to site specificity outside white cube gallery spaces in which artists are often constrained because she’s interested in hearing the voice, color, shape and functionality of a space as it exists. She aims to provide the most accurate and poignant response to each site, considering the conditions that might bring about the most fitting answers from her perspective within her ongoing thread of practice. “Curator questions have been very interesting for me to answer to the maximum from my knowledge and sensibility, so that each site-specific installation has been very meaningful and rewarding for me as a means to create a new path in my career and new path of experience and expression.”
Recently, Kimsooja completed a site-specific stained glass installation at the Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Metz in France, commissioned for the cathedral’s 800th anniversary. For her, it was a learning process—working with historical monuments and French stained glass specialists to realize her stainless steel and glass work To Breathe as a permanent installation. It was also her first time experimenting with Nano Polymer stained glass. Collaborating with the French master glassmaker Pierre-Alain Parot during the pandemic years, Kimsooja was able to juxtapose traditional handmade glass with industrial dichroic glass layered on top, producing an unexpected light effect that changes with the light source, its direction, the time of day and the intensity of light. “That kind of project that will stay forever is very meaningful.”
Another site-specific work Kimsooja created during the pandemic was Sowing into Painting (2020) at Wanås Konst in Sweden, where she planted nearly an acre of flax seeds. One side of the flax plant can be used to make linen canvas, while the other can be used to extract linseed oil for paint. For her, planting became an act of painting the land. The harvesting, making linen fiber, weaving with the local community and installing linen formed a cyclical project that marked a return to canvas after questioning the material—along with everything that comes with that questioning: experimenting and examining different ways of understanding it. It was a particularly meaningful project completed, as it was, during a personally difficult period, but seeing her field in full bloom brought her pleasure and hope.
Her most recent site-specific work was installed in AlUla, Saudi Arabia, a spectacular desert location that once lay below sea level with striking geological formations of rocks, mountains and sand fields. “Everything was in silence and in full light, and it was so special,” Kimsooja recalls. She created a circular maze of glass windows coated with a diffraction grating film, which breaks the intense sunlight into rainbow spectrums. It, too, became a kind of canvas for her, as the diffraction—woven from vertical and horizontal structures of near-nano-scale light lines—formed an immaterial, invisible fabric.
While Kimsooja’s practice has shifted from material to immaterial and from making to unmaking, she finds herself thinking about preservation more than she once did. Earlier in her career, when she worked with bed covers and other fabrics, she recycled materials and rarely preserved her own pieces as her works were typically not sold or collected by museums or private collectors. She now thinks she “should have saved more so that they could be used in different contexts, although it is not easy for textile installations.” In her large-scale, immaterial site-specific installations, she uses light and sound, void and reflection as core materials—balancing the ephemeral and the tangible in an evolving practice.
A quote from John Cage has had a lasting impact on Kimsooja’s artistic practice. It came from an undocumented installation by Cage at the final Paris Biennale in 1985. While Kimsooja had expected to see a music-related work, there was no sound and nothing in the space. “I discovered one panel, a white panel written in black all around the corner of the bottom side of the container, that read ‘the sound is heard.’ I was completely shocked and really affected by that phrase, and I immediately recognized him as a master, and since then, that phrase kept coming to my mind whenever I was questioning makings and non-makings.”
Kimsooja’s current projects harken back to her identity as a painter and explore the full potential of the color black. She has begun a series called Meta Painting, in which she sprays a water-based black pigment—one that absorbs 99 percent of light—onto linen canvases to create layered black surfaces. “It looks like a portrait, a person, but also like a tombstone in a way,” she says. She has also been painting on glass to examine the porosity of light when seen from the side, even to the naked eye. “It’s fascinating because it looks from the front like a textile, almost like velvet. But then, when you look back, it looks like a constellation in the sky.”
She first began exploring the color black when she created a completely dark room for the Korean Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013—a work that recalled the devastating impact of Hurricane Sandy on her community. It investigates ignorance as the source of people’s fear after disasters. The black painting project she is working on now is also a continuation of her Deductive Object series of sculpture-paintings and her Brahmanda (Indian cosmic egg) inspired works in Obangsaek, the traditional Korean spectrum of five colors. Even as her practice evolves, her work continues to explore immateriality, light and site-specificity through various media. To Kimsooja, site-specificity is never confined by a material or even the site itself.
