• 김수자의 보따리 작업은 바느질과 같은 여성의 가사행위가 예술적으로, 동시에 세계 무대의 맥락 속에서 어떻게 의미화되는지 흥미로운 지점을 보여준다. 어머니와 함께하던 바느질 기억으로부터 천을 이어 붙이는 회화적 천 작업과 조각적 보따리 작업이 탄생했다. 그 보따리는 30년 창작활동과 국내외 전시를 거치면서 양식적·매체적으로 다변화되고 미학적·정치적으로 심화, 확장되고 있다.

• 지금은 전설이 된 역사적 전시회 ‘떠도는 도시들(Cities on the Move)’(1997~1999)은 신자유주의와 글로벌리즘 영향하에 아시아가 지리정치학적 요지로 부상하면서 신도시 건설붐과 새 도시문화가 부흥되던 1990년대를 배경으로 기획된 시의적인 전시회였다. 작가는 자신의 작업에서 이정표가 된 ‘떠도는 도시들: 보따리 트럭 2727킬로미터’를 발표했다. 보따리를 가득 실은 트럭을 타고 장장 2727㎞를 달린 방랑의 여정을 기록한 이 비디오에서 작가는 스쳐가는 한국 풍경을 뒤로하며 보따리 위에 걸터앉은 채 고정된 프레임 속에서 내내 뒷모습만 보인다. 현대적 도시현상과 진보개념을 역행하듯 보따리와 쓸쓸한 여인의 뒷모습이 유랑민의 소외와 향수를 환기시킨다.

• 김수자는 1999년 뉴욕으로 이주했다. “문화적 망명자”를 자처한 그는 이방인의 삶을 영위하는 “한계 상황” 속에서 ‘바늘 여인’과 같은 퍼포먼스 비디오를 탄생시킨다. 첫번째 ‘바늘 여인’(1999~2001)은 도쿄·상하이·런던·뉴욕 등 인구가 밀집한 8개 대도시에서 촬영한 다채널 비디오다. 작가는 여기서도 관객으로부터 등을 돌린 채 대도시 군중 물결 한가운데 부동의 자세로 서 있다. 내적 동요를 불러일으키는 부동의 뒷모습, 그 특유의 이러한 미장센은 도쿄 시부야 번화가에서 느꼈던 실존적 경험에 근간한다. 행인 인파로 자신이 “지워지는” 느낌을 받는 순간, 그들과 하나 되는 일체감으로 “안도와 마음의 평화”를 되찾았다고 그는 회고한다. 이것이 무명의 군중을 보자기로 감싸는 연민·포용·환대의 감흥이 아니었을까?

• 두번째 ‘바늘 여인’(2005~2009)에서 작가는 정치적·종교적 분쟁, 내전·폭력과 빈곤으로 피폐해진 6개 도시인 파탄·예루살렘·사나·하바나·리우데자네이루·은자메나를 탐방했다. 착취되고 거세된 현장, 유토피아·디스토피아가 엇갈리는 혼란을 대면하면서 작가는 자신이 찌르고 봉합하는 바늘이 돼 지구와 인류의 불행을 지우는 치유자가 되기를 염원했다.

• 우리를 각성시키는 바늘 여인의 메시지는 ‘실의 궤적’(2010~2019) 연작에서 다른 모습으로 계승된다. 인류학적·고고학적·문명사적 다큐멘터리이자, 유럽과 남·동아시아, 북·남미, 아프리카 등 다른 문화권을 이동하며 직물의 경로를 추적한 이 대하 서사시에서 작가의 모습은 사라지고 카메라 뒤에서 응시하는 눈이 직조문화의 원형적 장면과 어휘를 포착하며 다양한 직조문화에 내재한 인간 존재의 원형, 원초적 생명원리를 발견하게 한다.

• 김수자는 한편으로 자신의 몸을 매체화하는 숨소리 사운드 퍼포먼스를 수행해왔다. ‘직조공장’(2004)은 폴란드 우치의 공장 빈 건물에서 영감을 받아 자신의 숨소리와 허밍 사운드로 공장을 재가동시킨다는 개념으로 발상됐다. 들숨·날숨의 반복되는 호흡을 씨줄·날줄로 교차되는 직물에 유비시키는 호흡 퍼포먼스는 2006년 베니스의 라 페니체 극장에서 발표한 ‘호흡: 보이지 않는 거울, 보이지 않는 바늘’로 본격화됐고, 같은 해 마드리드 크리스탈 팰리스 개인전 ‘호흡: 거울여인’에서는 건축물에 부착된 특수필름과 바닥에 설치된 거울을 통해 반사되는 빛이 호흡 퍼포먼스와 어우러지는, 빛과 호흡이 공명하는 공감각적 보따리를 창출했다.

• 숨소리와 빛으로 공간을 감싸는, 탈물질화된 보따리를 ‘후기 보따리’로 명명한다면, 2013년 베니스비엔날레 한국관 전시가 이를 명문화한다. 작가는 한국관의 유리 전면을 특수필름으로 덮어 무한대로 굴절되는 무지갯빛으로 공간을 가득 채우고, 바닥에 거울을 부착해 반사된 빛을 재투영시키는 만화경 같은 미러링 효과를 연출했다.

• 2016년 국립현대미술관 현대차시리즈 개인전 ‘마음의 기하학’에서도 관객이 점토를 구형으로 빚게 하는 퍼포먼스를 통해 ‘후기 보따리’를 예증했다. 특수필름을 사용하는 빛 작업과 함께 ‘구의 궤적’이란 새로운 소리 작업으로 관객을 공명시켰다. 커다란 타원형 탁자 위를 굴러가는 찰흙 공의 마찰 소리와 작가의 가글링 소리가 뒤섞인, 어떤 언술보다 강력한 주술적 초성의 마력이 관객과의 일체감을 조성했다. 이로써 주객체를 연결하는 ‘마음의 기하학’이 완결됐다.

• 보따리 오브제와 바늘 여인으로 2000년대 전후 세계 미술무대에서 명성을 얻은 김수자(1957∼)는 어머니와 이불보를 만들며 바느질을 하고 있을 때, 온 우주적 에너지가 자신의 몸을 통과하여 바늘 끝에 모이는 느낌을 경험했다고 밝혀왔다. 손으로 직물을 짜고 만드는 행위는 전통적으로 여성들이 전담했고, 이는 예술(art)이 아닌 수공예(craft)로 분류되었다. 그러나 ‘쓰여진 것’이라는 의미의 ‘텍스트(text)’의 라틴어 어원이 ‘짜여진 것(thing woven)’이라는 점을 상기해보면, 김수자의 작업들은 여성적 행위를 환유하는 ‘바느질’로 만든 직물들을 보여줄 뿐 아니라 이것들이 인간에 의해 직조되고 기록되어 온 문화·역사적인 텍스트로 확장되는 것으로 해석할 수 있다. 작가의 작업은 부차적인 것으로 간주되어 온 여성들의 서사가 사실은 인류의 문화·역사 기반 곳곳에 짙게 배어있다는 점을 은연중에 보여주는 것이다. 우리는 김수자의 작업에서 역사의 주변부로 위치 지워진 영역들의 문화인류학적 전복을 읽을 수 있다.

• 김수자가 미술대학을 다니던 1970년대 말∼1980년대 초반의 우리나라 화단은 크게 단색화 계열과 민중미술 계열 작가들로 양분되어 있었다고 볼 수 있다. 그리고 다다적인 오브제· 행위 미술, 개념미술 등 실험적인 작업을 탐구하는 작가들도 일군 존재했다. 그러나 김수자는 “정치적 미술이 내재한 공격적 측면에 공감할 수 없었고” [1] 그렇다고 단색화의 시류를 따르고 싶지 않았다. 그는 미술대학을 다니던 당시 재료와 물성에 대한 탐구뿐 아니라 아방가르드적인 설치나 퍼포먼스를 시도하기도 했다. 그러면서도 캔버스 회화의 구조와 이 세계의 내적 구조에 대해 고민하고 있었다는 김수자는 우리 주변에 이미 존재하는 십자(十字)형의 기호에서 그 답을 찾고자 했다. 김수자는 이러한 수평·수직의 기하학적 기호는 역사 이전의 시간에서부터 전해 내려온 것이며, 이것이 보이지 않는 우주의 질서와 본질을 함축하고 있기 때문이라는 아이디어를 석사학위 논문으로 발전시켰다. [2]

• 김수자는 자신에게 불편하지 않고 익숙한 소재들인 실, 바늘 등을 사용하여 캔버스 틀을 벗어난, 콜라주 회화 작업을 시작했다. 그는 당시의 자신에 작업에 대해 서양의 현대미술에서 다루지 않았던 재료를 사용하여 “여성의 일상을 현대미술사의 문맥에서 재해석하고 펼쳐 보이려는” [3] 아방가르드적 접근이었다고 평가했다. 씨실과 날실이 종횡으로 엮인 비단 이불보, 그리고 이를 바늘이 수직으로 뚫고 들어가고 나가고를 반복하며 잇는 행위는 김수자가 구축해나가기 시작한 고유의 조형적 세계관을 시각적으로 풀어낸 형식이었다. 김수자의 초기 ‘꿰매기’ 회화는 곧 우리에게 잘 알려진 입체적 보따리 오브제로 변주되었고, 이 꿰매기와 보따리 모티프는 이후 전개된 작가의 영상작업에서도 영감의 원천이 되었다.

• 작가의 초기 ‘꿰매기’ 회화 작품은 사각형의 조각보들과 색동천을 한 땀 한 땀 바느질하여 이어붙인 것이다. 바느질 자국을 살펴보면 작가는 사실 이보다 더 규칙적이고 반듯하게 잘 꿰맸을 수 있었을 것이다. 어느 지점은 바느질이 듬성듬성하고 또 어느 지점은 꽤 촘촘하다. 사용된 천의 모양도 정확하게 재단된 정사각형이나 직사각형이 아니고, 모서리 실밥이 드문드문 풀어헤쳐진 것이 보인다. 작가는 당시 수평·수직의 문제에 깊이 빠져있었다고 했는데, 김수자의 조각보 콜라주 회화에 드러난 수평·수직은 몬드리안의 기하추상 회화와 달리 정확하고 단단하게 각이 잡혀있지 않다. 천 조각들을 덧대어 성기게 이어붙인 마디를 들추면 미세하게 벌어지는 틈이 남겨져 있는 것이다. 어떤 조각보 면은 검은 잉크와 아크릴 물감이 거칠게 덧발라져 있다. 수평과 수직의 조형요소로 추출된, 균형 잡힌 완전함에 대한 갈망에도 불구하고 본디 우리의 삶은 아무리 계획하고 재단해도 엉성하며 때로는 암흑으로 뒤덮이기도 한다는 것을 은유하듯 말이다.

• 김수자는 전통 가옥의 문살에 이 형형색색의 조각보들을 덧대거나 휘감는 설치 작업을 지나 조각보 자체를 볼륨을 가진 입체적 오브제로 발전시킨다. 그는 1992년 뉴욕현대미술관 PS1 레지던시에 참여했을 때, 이불보로 만든 보따리 작업을 선보였다. 뉴욕 레지던시에서 보따리에 싸인 자신의 짐을 보고 영감을 얻었던 것이다. 지금은 세대교체와 생활양식의 변화로 보따리가 흔하게 볼 수 있는 사물은 아니지만 당시 한국인에게 아주 익숙한 사물이었던 보따리는 그저 둥글게 말은 짐꾸러미였다. 그 꾸러미 안에는 귀한 선물이 들어있기도 하고, 장소를 옮겨가면서도 꼭 가지고 가야 하는 필수적이고 소중한 물건들이 싸매져 있었다. 불편한 이동 중에도 이고 지고 들고 간 짐꾸러미 보따리에는 낯선 곳에서 잘 뿌리내리고 살아가보겠다는 의지와 간절한 마음이 깃들어 있던 것이다.

• 보따리 오브제의 소재인 비단 이불보는 한국인이 겪는 생로병사의 흔적이 내재된 천이다. 우리는 이불 위에서 나고 죽으며, 잠들고 사랑한다. 한국 여성들은 여전히 인생의 큰 관문인 혼인을 준비할 때 혼수와 예단으로 이불을 준비한다. 김수자는 한국 전통색감의 이불보와 조각보를 사용한 것은 오직 오리엔탈리즘, 포스트식민주의, 한국의 지역적 미학에 대한 관심에서 비롯된 것이 아니라 그것들이 본인 삶의 큰 부분이었기 때문이었다고 말했다. [4] 또한 작가는 최근 인터뷰에서 “그 재료 자체가 현대미술의, 특히 회화의 평면성과 그 구조를 실험하는 유효한 출발점이라고 생각했고 만약 이것이 실존의 문제, 여성과 인간의 본질적 삶의 화두를 가져오는 재료가 아니었다면 쓰지 않았을 것” [5] 이라고 밝혔다. 1990년대에는 지구촌, 세계화가 화두였던 시기였다. 권력과 위계를 해체하는 포스트모더니즘 이론은 경제적·문화적 패권을 쥐고 있던 미국과 유럽 중심주의를 벗어나 주변부, 제3세계에 대한 관심을 불러일으켰다. 이에 따라 중심부에 편입되지 못하고 떠도는 자들에 대한 이야기(이산과 유목주의)가 미술계의 하나의 거대 주제로 부상하였다. 따라서 작가가 의도하였든 아니든, 이러한 한국적인 소재와 정서는 역으로 세계무대에서 좋은 반응을 얻었다.

• 보따리 오브제 설치는 영상작업으로 확장되었다. <떠도는 도시들 - 보따리 트럭 2727km>(1997)은 용달 트럭에 실린 보따리들 위에 올라앉은 작가의 뒷모습을 보여준다. 이 트럭은 어린 시절 작가가 이사 다녔던 우리나라의 지역들을 찾아 이동하는데, 이렇게 이동하는 작가의 뒷모습을 바라보던 관객은 마치 작가의 뒷자리에 함께 앉아 이사가는 그 상황 속에 놓인 듯한 느낌을 받게 된다. 덜컹거리며 나아가는 보따리 트럭에 몸을 싣고서 멀리 앞을 응시하는 작가의 모습은 명상적이다. 이동하는 그 상황 속에 함께 놓인 관객은 경계를 넘어 새로운 영토에 들어가 그가 맞닥뜨릴 삶에 대한 두려움, 희망 그리고 잠시 익숙했던 곳을 떠나야만 하는 아쉬움의 감정을 공유하게 된다. 그리고 묶은 머리를 길게 내려뜨린 이 여성이 홀로 짐꾸러미를 싸고 이를 트럭에 단단히 동여맸을 모습을 짐작하게 된다. 결국, 김수자의 보따리 트럭 영상작업은 때로는 정착에 성공하였을 테지만, 대부분은 본 땅에 안착하지 못하고 가장자리를 배회했을 외부인·이민자들의 외로운 역사의 기억을 여성의 몸으로써 불러일으킨다. 작가는 이 작업이 “나와 우리 가족의 뿌리에 관한 기록에 가까웠다”고 [6] 했다. 이 영상작업은 한스 울리히 오브리스트와 하랄드 제만이 각각 기획했던 국제 전시에 출품되었고, 이를 기점으로 김수자는 세계 미술계에서 명성을 쌓아갔다.

• 김수자의 최초의 영상작업 <바느질하며 걷기 - 경주>(1994)는 돌과 낙엽이 쌓인 땅 위에 원색의 이불보들을 넓게 펼쳐두고, 작가가 그 위를 걸으며 이불보들을 손으로 하나씩 거둬들이는 퍼포먼스 영상이다. 바닥에 깔린 다채로운 이불보들을 발로 밟고, 손으로 거둬들이며, 이를 팔에 걸치는 작가의 행위는 스스로 바늘의 역할을 하고 있음을 암시한다. 이는 퍼포먼스가 자연이라는 거대한 캔버스를 꿰매고 있음을 상징적으로 개념화 한 작업이었다. 또한 베틀을 이용해 실을 수평·수직의 엮어 손으로 삼베를 짜던 여성들의 전통적인 모습을 은유한다고 볼 수 있다. 전술하였듯, 생로병사의 흔적이 내재된 이불보를 긴머리를 하나로 묶은 여성이 바늘이 되어 그 속을 들고 나며 엮는 모습을 보여주는 것이다. 이 작업은 이후 제작된 김수자의 영상작업들에서 발견되는 공통적인 주제를 예고한다.

• <바늘 여인>(1999∼2001)에서 작가는 8개의 각 화면 가운데 등을 보인 채 부동의 자세로 서 있다. <보따리 트럭>에서처럼 관객은 긴머리를 하나로 묶은 작가의 뒷모습을 보게 되고, 작가의 옆을 스쳐 지나가는 도쿄·상하이·멕시코시티·런던·델리·뉴욕·카이로·라고스 도심 속 수많은 군중들을 마주치게 된다. 8채널 영상 속 전 세계 군중들에 둘러싸인 관객은 그들의 바쁜 움직임과 강한 에너지를 함께 느끼게 된다. 제목에서 드러나듯 이 영상에서 작가는 명확하게 바늘의 역할을 자처하며, 여기에 지켜보는 관객도 가담시킨다. 그렇다면 바늘에 꿸 실과 원색의 원단들은 어디에 있는가. 바늘 여인 옆을 스쳐가는 한 사람, 한 사람이 각각의 날실이자 직물이 되는 것이다. 그 하나하나의 날실에 축적된 각자의 시간과 기억들, 삶의 아우라가 바늘 여인과 관객의 곁을 통과하는 것이다. 결국, 이 작업은 자유롭게 흐르는 이러한 수많은 날실들이 서로 엮이고 상호 관계되어 그 도시 고유의 사회문화적 콘텍스트가 만들어지고 있음을 함축적으로 보여준다. 바늘 여인인 작가는 이 과정에 관객이 적극 동참하도록 제안하면서 홀로 독창적이고 중심적인 모더니즘적 작가의 지위에서 벗어난다.

• 김수자의 비교적 최근 작업인 <실의 궤적>(2010∼2019)은 문화의 다양성에 대한 존중과 경의가 담긴 문화인류학적 다큐멘터리라고 부를 수 있다. 다양한 문화권의 직조문화를 다루고 있는 이 영상작업 시리즈는 6개의 장으로 구성되어 있는데, 각 챕터는 페루의 직물 문화(Ⅰ), 유럽의 레이스 문화(Ⅱ), 인도의 판목 날염 문화(Ⅲ), 중국의 자수 문화(Ⅳ), 미국 원주민의 직물과 바구니 문화(Ⅴ), 모로코의 모자이크 타일 문화(Ⅵ) 등을 기록하여 보여준다. 손으로 꿰매고, 엮고, 두드려서 만드는 각 민족 고유의 공예 방식과 그 민족이 살아온 대자연·고대 유적·건축물 등을 화면 속에 병렬한 것이다.

• 예를 들어, Ⅰ장에서는 페루 전통의상을 입은 여성이 꽃과 식물의 잎으로 염색한 실을 손으로 감고 돌려가며 직물(textile)을 짜고 있다. 고대 페루 문화에서 직물짜기는 개인과 지역의 정체성을 보여주는 중요한 방식이었다. 알파카·라마·양의 털 등 자연에서 온 원료가 여인의 손에서 실의 형태로 뽑혀 나와 텍스타일로 만들어지는 것이다. 작가는 페루 여성이 입고 있는 전통의상의 자수 문양과 그의 뒤로 보이는 고대 페루 유적지의 기하학적 패턴, 그리고 여성의 손에 의해 돌고 있는 실패의 모양에서 형태적 유사성이 발견되도록 카메라 촬영 구도를 의도하였다. 유럽의 레이스 제작문화를 다룬 Ⅱ장에서는 바람에 흔들리는 초목과 꽃을 보여주던 화면이 손으로 보빈 레이스를 만드는 유럽 여성의 모습으로 전환된다. 그리고 자연을 닮은 보빈 레이스의 문양과 유럽 건축물에서 발견되는 구조가 어떻게 연결되어 있는지 보여준다.

• 김수자의 이 영상작업은 여성은 자연, 남성은 문화와 연관되어 있다는 인류학의 전통적인 이분법적 서술에 부드럽게 저항한다. 여성적 작업의 기호인 공예와 텍스타일이 각 민족·지역의 텍스트, 콘텍스트를 구성하고 있음을 보여주는 것이다. 작가는 자연, 전통의상, 직물, 공예, 음식, 건축을 화면 속에 병치하고 뒤섞는 방식을 채택했다. 이를 통해 그동안 인류학자들이 특권적으로 규정해 온, 인간의 문화 및 사상의 발전사라는 거대 구조의 근저에는 젠더화 된 남성·여성적의 작업 모두 공존한다는 것을 암시한다.

• 바느질에서 출발한 김수자의 작업은 여성적인 행위와 노동을 자연, 결혼, 가족 등 여성에게 허락되어온 영역 속에 종속시켜 묘사하지 않고, 젠더화 된 권력과 지식체계를 균형 있게 재구성하는 시도를 보여준다. 인류의 문화양식은 서서히 축적되어 변증법적으로 발전되어 왔다. 이 발전과정 속에는 언제나 역사의 승자만 존재했던 것은 아니다. 김수자는 그다지 중요한 것으로 여겨지지 않았던, 중심의 바깥에 위치한 사물, 기억, 존재들을 작업 속으로 끌고 와 탐구자의 시선으로 조명한다. 이를 통해 서구의 지배적인 이론과 지식으로 편중된 우리 사고체계의 틈새에 새로운 무게 추를 올려둔다.

• ‘작가 김수자’ 하면 맨 먼저 떠오르는 이미지가 ‘보따리’다. 주로 서민들의 이삿짐이었던 알록달록한 이불 천으로 된 보따리는 김수자 작업의 화두이자 1990년대 미술의 주요 아이콘이다. 모든 것을 아우르면서도 또 다른 곳을 향한 떠남을 암시하는 보따리는 세계가 하나로 이어지고 여행과 이주가 빈번해진 이른 바 전 지구화 시대를 표상하는 모티프가 되었다. 더하여, 한국의 토착문화, 그중에서도 특히 여성문화와 그 문화의 이동을 의미함으로써 로컬과 글로벌, 주변과 중심이 교차하는 당대 세계의 문화지형도에도 적절하게 부합하였다. 보따리 작업이 구체적으로 시작된 것은 1992년 우연한 계기를 통해서이지만 그 연원은 이전 으로 거슬러 올라간다. 김수자가 수업기를 보낸 1970년대 말~1980년대 초는 이른바 단색화 시대였는데, 이때부터 그는 단색화의 모더니즘 미학, 특히 그 고답적인 정신주의에 의문을 가지면서 천이라는 촉각적 재료와 바느질이라는 일상공예 기법을 평면작업에 적용하는 실험을 시도하였다. 또한 자신의 신체 움직임을 기하학적 구조로 분석한 <구조-몸의 연구>(1981, 사진, 실크스크린)에서처럼, ‘몸’을 작업의 주요 계기로 주목하게 된다. 몸과 그 몸이 살아가는 일상이라는 화두에 점차 이끌리게 된 것인데, 이에 확신을 갖게 한 계기가 작가가 자주 언급해온 어머니와의 바느질이다.

• “어머니와 함께 이불을 꿰매는 일상적인 행위 속에서 나의 사고와 감수성과 행위 이 모두가 일치하는 은밀하고도 놀라운 일체감을 체험했으며... 천이 가지는 기본 구조로서의 날실과 씨실, 우리 천의 그 원초적인 색감, 평면을 넘나드는 꿰매는 행위의 천과의 자기동일성, 그리고 그것이 불러일으키는 묘한 향수... 이 모든 것들에 나 자신은 완전히 매료되었다고 할 수 있다.”[1]

• 1983년의 이 경험을 통해 그는 당대 두 주류로 대치하고 있던 단색화와도, 민중미술과도 다른, 자신만의 작업에 집중하게 된다. 이후 그는 알록달록한 천의 질감과 바느질 자국을 드러내는 천 콜라주로, 지게나 얼레 등 전통기물을 천으로 싼 오브제 작업으로, 그리고 천 조각들 자체를 오브제 삼아 집적한 아쌍블라주로 과감하게 나아갔다. 평면작업의 재료가 되었던 천이 점차 그 자체로서 미학적 의미를 드러내게 된 것이다.

• 이런 천 작업의 연장선상에서 1992년 우연한 계기로 발견한 모티프가 ‘보따리’다. 그가 뉴욕 PS1에 체류 중이던 어느 날 천 재료들을 싸서 보관한 보따리가 눈에 띄게 되었는데, 작가의 말처럼, 그 순간 보따리는 “하나의 조각이고 회화”[2]가 되었다. 서로 다른 것을 하나로 아우르는 보따리는 또한 바늘 없는 바느질, 즉 어머니와의 일상에서 발견한 새로운 미학의 또 다른 구현물이었다.

• 이렇게 발견한 보따리를 김수자는 같은 해 오픈 스튜디오에서 처음 전시하게 되는데, 이 작업에도 이전 오브제 싸기 작업과 마찬가지로 <연역적 오브제>라는 이름을 붙였다. 천으로 또 다른 평면을 만들어가는 초기 작업의 귀납적인 방법에 대해 천을 통해 오브제를 역 추적한다는 의미를 함축한 이 명칭이 보따리에도 부합했기 때문이다. 그에게 보따리는 하나의 모티프로 그치는 것이 아니라 자신의 작업 원리를 구현한 시각 기호였던 것이다.

• 싸고 묶고 풀고 다시 싸는 과정을 함축한 보따리는 여성의 일상 특히 그 신체적 움직임과 긴밀하게 엮인 오브제인데, 이를 구체화한 예가 1994년의 전시 《바느질하여 걷기》(갤러리 서미)다. 전시장 바닥에 배치된 보따리들과 옷가지들, 오래된 가옥이나 자연 속에 놓인 보따리와 펼쳐진 천들 사이에서 움직이는 작가를 찍은 영상, 그리고 그 설치 공간 속을 걸어 다니는 관람자를 찍은 실시간 영상으로 이루어진 이 전시는 보따리가 여성 몸의 움직임과 하나가 되는 과정을 구현한 총체적 퍼포먼스였다. 영상에서 작가는 스스로 보따리들 중 하나가 되거나 보따리 천을 펼치고 싸거나 자연이라는 드넓은 천 속으로 바느질하듯 걸어 들어가는 행위를 시연하였다. 자신의 모든 작업을 천이 이끄는 ‘퍼포먼스’[3]라고 한 작가의 입장이 이 전시를 통해 구체화된 것이다.

• 이렇게 관람자를 퍼포머로 끌어들이는 퍼포먼스는 1995년 광주비엔날레 작업으로도 이어졌다. 중외공원에서 이루어진 같은 제목의 작업에서 작가는 자연 속에 헌 옷과 보따리들을 펼쳐 놓고 관람자들이 그 속을 걸을 수 있게 하였다. 반전 운동의 상징 존 레논의 노래 ‘이매진(Imagine)’과 ‘스탠 바이 미(Stand by Me)’가 흘러나오는 현장은 광주 민주화운동의 참상을 떠올리게 하면서 이 작업의 정치적 의미를 부각하였다. 두 달여 전시 후에 흙과 낙엽과 옷이 뒤범벅이 된 현장은 이를 다시 확인하게 했다. 이 작업을 통해 보따리는 희생자의 넋을 기린다는 치유의 의미 또한 함축하게 되었다. 보따리는 퍼포먼스와 엮이면서 바느질로, 그 신체적 구현으로서의 걷기로, 그리고 그 심리적 효과로서의 아우르기로 그 의미가 확장되어 간 것이다.

• 이런 퍼포먼스와 함께 보따리가 움직임 혹은 이동의 매체이자 도상으로 부각된 것은 당연한 수순일 것이다. 보따리와 작가의 몸이 함께 이동하는 <떠도는 도시들-2727Km 보따리 트럭>(1997)이 그 증거다.

“보따리를 싸고 풀듯이 내 몸 역시 끊임없이 머물고 떠납니다.”[4]

• 1995년의 한 대담에서의 작가의 이 말이 예언이 된 듯, 2년 후 그는 스스로 하나의 보따리가 되어 다른 보따리들과 함께 머물고 떠나는 여정을 시도하였다. 보따리를 실은 트럭에 작가가 함께 타고 11일 동안 전국의 마을들을 누비는 퍼포먼스이자 이를 기록한 비디오 영상인 이 작업은 아우름과 함께 떠남의 계기를 함축하는 보따리 미학을 작가가 몸소 실천한 예다. 이사가 잦았던 어린 시절 주거지들을 거쳐 가는 이 여정을 통해 그 자신도 모든 것을 아우르면서도 끊임없이 떠나는, 혹은 떠남으로써 또 다른 것을 아우르는 보따리가 되었다.

• 작가 자신 또한 유목 혹은 여행의 주체로 부각된 것인데, 전 세계 여러 도시들에서 이루어진 거리 퍼포먼스를 기록한 <바늘 여인> 시리즈(1999~)는 이런 작가 개념이 또 다른 형태로 이어진 예다. 작가 스스로 바늘이 되어 현지인들 속으로 스며드는 과정을 기록한 이 비디오 작업에서 보따리는 사라졌지만 그 의미는 “치유의 도구”[5]로서의 바늘을 통해 구현되었다. 여기서 김수자는 자신의 몸을 스쳐 가는 낯선 이들을 조용히 바라보는 뒷모습으로 등장한다. 그에게 여행은 다른 문화를 포획하기 위한 것이 아니라 그 문화를 있는 그대로 수용하고 또한 있는 그대로 두고 떠나기 위한 것이다. 이는 19세기 산업혁명이 촉발한 남성적 정복의 여행과 대극에 있다. 마치 바늘이 헝겊과 헝겊을 이어주고 떠나듯, 보따리가 서로 다른 천들을 감쌌다 풀어주듯 그는 아우름과 떠남의 반복으로서의 여행, 이른바 여성적 포용의 여행을 실천한 것이다. 어머니와의 바느질 체험이 사회적 차원으로 드러난 그의 여행은 사람과 사람을 이어주는 부드러운 정치학의 구현이다. 소외된 지역이나 분쟁 지역에서 이루어진 이후의 작업들이 이를 보다 선명하게 드러낸다.

• 이렇게 김수자의 작업을 이끌어 온 것이 보따리와 그 미학이며 이는 현재까지도 이어지고 있다. 보따리는 펼쳐져 빨래처럼 널리기도, 낯선 이국 카페의 테이블보로 쓰이기도, 조각조각 잘려 벽돌 틈새에 끼워지기도 하면서 변이를 거듭해 왔다. 비디오 작업 또한 장소를 달리하면서 지속되었다. 보따리 트럭은 1998년 사웅파울로 비엔날레 등 전 세계 여러 곳에서 전시되면서 이른바 노마디즘(nomadism) 시대의 아이콘이 되었다. 특히 ‘코소보 난민에게 바침’이라는 부제가 붙은 1999년 베니스 비엔날레의 것은 이주와 그에 따른 문제를 전 세계적인 차원으로 확장하는 계기가 되었다. 2007년 파리에서 이민자 관련 장소들을 순회하면서 다시 제작된 보따리 트럭에는 ‘이주’라는 부제가 붙었다. 이는 최근 작가가 전시감독을 맡은 푸아티에 비엔날레 《가로지르기/김수자》(2019.10.12.~2020.1.19.)에도 전시되었으며, <보따리>라는 이름으로 설치된 뉴욕 이삿짐 컨테이너와 함께 전시의 의미를 각인시켰다. 보따리가 바느질로 개념화된 <바늘 여인> 또한 전 세계 여러 도시에서 시연되어 왔다.

• 마드리드 크리스털 궁전 설치 작업(2006)에서 시작된 <숨쉬기> 연작은 보따리 개념을 건축적 공간에 적용한 예다. 유리창에 붙인 회절격자 필름을 통해 오방색 빛으로 가득 찬 공간을 연출한 것인데, 이는 빛으로 가득 찬, 그리고 그 빛의 움직임처럼 살아 숨 쉬는 보따리다. 스피커를 통해 들려오는 작가의 숨소리와 허밍소리는 그 공간을 거대한 신체로 체험하게 한다. 전 세계 다양한 건물들을 옮겨 다니며 지속되고 있는 이런 작업과 함께 보따리는 점차 비 물질화되고 개념화되어 왔는데, 근작 <마음의 기하학>(2016)은 그것이 심리적인 차원으로 발현된 예다. 관람자들은 점토로 각자의 형상을 만들면서 마음의 보따리를 싸고 푸는 과정을 통해 자신과 타인의 내면을 넘나들게 되는 것이다.

• 1990년대를 관통하고 2000년대로 이어진 김수자 작업은 그 자체가 신체적, 심리적 유목의 도정이었다. 평면도 입체도, 비움도 채움도 되는 보따리의 유연함이 그의 작업, 그 유목을 가능하게 한 것이며, 이를 통해 그의 작업은 인간 사회를 넘어 자연과 우주를 포괄하는 방향으로 전개되었다. 작업의 내용 뿐 아니라 작업방식, 나아가 전시와 사회활동에 있어서도 작가의 유목은 지속되었다. 자신의 뉴욕 행을 일종의 “문화적 망명”[6]으로 본 작가 말대로, 그는 단지 물리적으로 뿐 아니라 심리, 사회적으로도 거처를 옮겨 다닌 것이다. 1980년대 중·후반에는 일본과 대만, 1990년대 초·중엽에는 뉴욕, 이후 전 세계 여러 도시들로 이어진 그의 여정은 아직도 지속되고 있다. “언제쯤 바느질 뜸을 따라 걸어가는 이 길이 끝날 것인가”7라는 작가 자신의 질문은 진행 중이다.

• 이렇게 끊임없이 움직이는 작업의 여정에서 작가 이미지는 거의 변하지 않는 모습, 즉 긴 검은 머리를 묶거나 땋은 뒷모습으로 기호화되어 왔다. 작업의 유동성에도 불구하고 작가 자신은 전형적인 아시아 여성으로서의 이미지를 고수해왔는데, 이런 이미지는 그의 작업을 페미니즘과 관련짓지 않을 수 없게 한다. 김수자 스스로도, 페미니스트 작가를 자처하지는 않지만, 자신의 여성적 정체성을 부정하지는 않으며 작업을 통해서도 이를 일관되게 추구해왔다. 여성적 일상, 특히 어머니와의 모성적 유대관계를 통해서 발견한 소재와 기법에서 출발한 그의 작업은 이른바 ‘여성적 감수성(feminine sensibility)'의 존재를 확인하게 하는 점에서 페미니즘 중에서도 본질주의(essentialism)와 닿아 있다. 자신의 재료인 천을 “감싸고 덮고 보호하는 것” 즉 “여성의 자궁과 같은 이미지”8로 본 작가의 입장이 이를 확인하게 한다.

• 1990년대 미술에서 김수자 작업이 의미 있는 위치를 차지한다면, 그것은 단순히 재료와 기법을 통해 여성적 일상을 미술의 영역으로 수용하고 설치와 퍼포먼스, 비디오 등 새로운 방법과 매체 실험을 시도하였기 때문만은 아니다. 몸과 마음 같은 생리, 심리의 세계와 기하학적 구조라는 수학 혹은 과학의 원리를 융합하려는 의도가 초기 작업에서부터 일관되게 내재되어 있는 것을 목도할 수 있듯이, 그의 작업의 진정한 의미는 서구 근대의 이분법적 세계관을 넘어선 또 다른 미학을 제안한 점에 있다. 이는 서구 근대를 추동한 남성 미학, 그 배제의 논리에 대해 포용의 원리라는 대안을 제안하는 점에서 여성 미학으로 이름 지을 수 있을 것이다.

• 보따리는 이러한 여성 미학의 출발점이자 그 도상이다. 모든 것을 아우르면서도 또한 모든 것을 떠나보내는 보따리는 하나의 목표를 향해 정진해 온 모더니스트 영웅 신화, 그 남성적인 직진의 논리를 비껴간다. 한국성의 기호이자 여성성의 기호인 보따리는 다양한 문화들과의 접점과 함께 차이를 또한 만들어내면서 로컬 문화를 글로벌한 지평에 스며들게 하였다. 로컬 문화를 통한 글로벌한 아우름의 표상인 그것은 정복이 아닌 포용을 지향하는, 그런 의미에서 여성적인 글로벌리즘의 도상이다.

• 몸과 천이 하나가 된 또 다른 보따리 <만남-바라보며 바느질하기>(1998, 2011)에서 나는 천에서 혼령을 불러내는 영매와 같은 예술가, 김수자를 본다. 그는 보따리 작업을 시작한 이래 아우름과 떠남을 반복하면서 인간과 인간, 문화와 자연의 교응을 중개해 왔다. ‘아우르고 떠나기’ 이것이 김수자의 노마디즘, 이를 통한 글로벌리즘의 진정한 정체다.

• While most people were locking down this May, Korean artist Kimsooja was hanging out laundry, in a wood northeast of Malmö, not too far from the border between Sweden and Denmark, on the site of a medieval castle and an organic farm. Between the trees, 100 pristine white bedsheets are pinned to clotheslines and flap, like so many captured cartoon ghosts, in the wind. They give an idea of stains removed, fresh starts, new beginnings, extreme hygiene and slates wiped clean. And, with their embroidered trims (an example of local craftspersonship), of old traditions of manufacture and housework, which to a lot of us might seem anachronistic in a world of urbanised living, rapid manufacture, household convenience and washing machines. White: the mark of mourning, purity and rebirth. Or perhaps all this is to overthink what is simply evidence of an easily comprehensible, quotidian routine.

• But overthinking is a pastime in which many of us have had an opportunity to indulge over the past few months. Locked down, changing our routines, afraid of other people, afraid of going out, conjuring profundity out of banality and, egged on by politicians around the world, constantly redefining what we mean by ‘normal’. As if the term was anything other than subjective in the first place.

• The sheets make up an artwork titled A Laundry Field (2020). If that ‘A’ before ‘laundry field’ suggests that it is one of many, it is. And in more ways than one. On the one hand, because what we see is nothing new: many people around the world hang out their washing to dry; they’ve been doing it since they had things to wash, and things to hang them on. If you stumbled across the washables here, at Wanås Konst, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was simply evidence of a routine interrupted by, say, a sudden global health emergency meaning that no one was around to take it in. On the other hand, A Laundry Field is a development of earlier works by Kimsooja, such as Mumbai: A Laundry Field (2007–08), a multi-channel video that uses footage of the city to cast the overcrowded Maharashtra port as a field inhabited by people wearing clothes and people cleaning or drying clothes. Both works play with their ‘matter-of-fact’ nature and are evocative in their banality, their normality and the ways in which they accept – but do not insist on – projection and interpretation on the part of the viewer. You want to see garments as embodying the history and traces of human bodies? Fine. You just see ordinary life? That’s a truth too. It’s a form of equivocation that lies at the heart of much of Kimsooja’s work. And, you might say, at the heart of much good art. ‘I saw art in life and life as art,’ the artist said in a 2008 interview with Susan Sollins. ‘I couldn’t separate one from another. So my gaze to the world and my questions were always related to life itself.’

• Kimsooja’s best known works feature bottari, a traditional Korean cloth bundle used to wrap goods in preparation for transport by hand. While such fabrics (bottari are often recycled from colourful bedspreads) have acquired links over time to the gendering of labour, the dynamics of domestic and civic power and the segregation of public and private space, bottari bundles are also evocative of displacement and migration (frequently, and particularly in terms of Korea’s modern history, as a result of war and famine), symbolic of both the home and a lack of one.

• Although this interest is born of the artist’s Korean cultural heritage – her own ‘reality’, as she puts it – it developed as a medium to be used in more than just two-dimensional works (the artist trained as a painter) when she was displaced from that heritage, during a 1992 residency at moma ps1 in New York. There, the museum became a space in which to accept the bottari’s cultural baggage and to subvert it. In the resultant installation, Deductive Object, she inserted fragments of Korean bedcovers into gaps in the gallery’s brick wall and made static sculptures out of a series of everyday objects covered in bottari cloth. Over the years the bottari works have developed simultaneously as a reality and an abstraction, similar to the way in which civic and social culture across the world has drifted these past few months. Cities on the Move – 2727 Kilometers Bottari Truck (1997, first shown in the group exhibition Cities on the Move, from which the work’s title derives) was a performance and video documenting the artist’s 11-day journey across South Korea, visiting places with which she had a personal connection, on the back of a truck overloaded with tied bottari bundles; To Breathe: A Mirror Woman (2006) saw her clad Madrid’s Crystal Palace in translucent, light-refracting film in such a way that the building itself and the atmosphere within it became a colourful wrapping, a type of bottari.

• At the same time Kimsooja has expanded such interests beyond her own cultural inheritance in works like the ongoing Thread Routes (2010–), a series of videos inspired after witnessing traditional lace- making in Bruges in 2002. Taking the performative elements of local textile cultures as its subject, the first focuses on Peruvian weaving and the relationship it has with issues of tradition, gender, historic and vernacular architecture, and local landscapes.

• Further chapters have explored European, Indian, Chinese, Native American and Moroccan practices to create a body of work that further evokes relationships between the particular and the universal, and brings to mind the poetry of mystics such as Kabir. A fifteenth-century Muslim weaver from India, Kabir linked the process of textile manufacture to meditation on and exploration of the divine in his verses. Indeed, they proved to be so successful and easily comprehensible that his influence spans both Islam and Hinduism, and the practices of Bhakti and yoga. Works by Kimsooja such as To Breathe: A Mirror Woman and the interactive installation Archive of Mind (2016) have featured recordings of the artist’s own breathing as components of the installation, while she refers to the videos that make up Thread Routes as a form of “visual poetry”.

• “The reality of myself and my culture has constantly and gradually evolved, and rather dramatically since I moved to New York,” the artist writes as we exchange emails between London and Korea and their respective lockdowns.

• “This move gave me the perspective of my own culture as part of a multi-cultural context. Yet, I held the string of my particular personal life as a continuum that questions fundamental and existential problems: what Zen Buddhism describes as ‘Wha Du (in Korean, Gong An in Chinese)’. This might have given me the consistency and long breath in my career.” She’s referring to the practice in which a story, statement or question is used to provoke a crisis of doubt in the mind of a student of Zen on their pathway to enlightenment. And perhaps nowhere in her work is such a crisis evoked more than in the video series A Needle Woman (1999–2001). In it the artist, clad in grey, is recorded, standing motionless, her back to camera, generally against the flow of traffic, in some of the busiest pedestrian junctions in some of the most densely populated metropolises in the world (Shanghai, Tokyo, Mexico City and Delhi). It’s a work that explores the ways in which losing yourself is linked to finding yourself, about the individual and the collective, and one that has added resonance now that crowds are a source of added fear. The last is something the Nobel Prize-winning writer Elias Canetti described as ‘the touch of the unknown’ in his 1960 analysis of relations between the self and others, Crowds and Power. Although one of Canetti’s assertions – ‘It is only in a crowd that a man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which fear turns into its opposite’ – is looking a bit shaky right now.

• “Artists often discover the art in daily life,” the artist writes, “and bring daily life to the museum to contextualise it within art history.” Indeed, even before the intrusions of urinals and readymades and the age of modern art museums, attempts by the authors of poetry (whether visual or written) to engage with the unauthored poetics of everyday life have enjoyed a rich history, not least in painting, and works by Joseon artists such as Danwon, or the seventeenth-century Dutch masters. Yet on the site of the museum there is often a question about what – between daily life and art history – is contextualising or responding to what. And an anxiety about whether it is the artworks in a museum or the circumstances of lived experience that gets audiences closer to truths about the world. All of which responds to a more general paranoia that what enters the museum is removed from lived life. And perhaps it’s a paradox of museum culture for artists like Kimsooja that the more she has sought to introduce the ordinary, the more her work is celebrated as extraordinary.

• As we discuss A Laundry Field, Kimsooja explains that her works have been shown mostly within the museum context, but for a few exceptions. “In museum spaces,” she writes, “I used fans, lights, and sounds to give a vibration to it and bring sensation to the audiences as they encounter the persona of the fabrics. When situated within nature, such as Wanås sculpture park [the Swedish foundation is located in a natural landscape], the wind, light, cast shadows of trees, and bird sounds paint the laundered bedcovers and evoke the memories and poetics of the bedcovers. I find A Laundry Field installed at Wanås sculpture park gives an experience that blurs the boundary between daily life and the museum context that maximises the audience’s imagination and experience.” Reading this, it’s hard not to think of the new work as an attack on the exceptionalism of the museum context.

• In that, the exhibition at Wanås, titled Sowing into Painting, goes a little further than other works by Kimsooja. It traces a circle through her varied output (it contains chapters one, two and four of Thread Routes, a series of the Deductive Objects (1993–2020), Meta-Painting (2020, which comprises stretched and frame linen canvases as well as bottaris made of linen canvas and used clothes) and To Breathe (2020, an evolution of the work shown in Madrid). And it traces a circle through the manufacture of painting in the title work Sowing into Painting, a field sown with two types of flax that are harvested to produce canvas and other fabrics as well as the linseed oil that is classically used as a binding agent in Western painting. It returns the exceptional to the normal, culture to nature, and a life observed (not least in the types of paintings of ‘everyday’ life that populate museums and other archives) to a life lived.

• Zweimal in ihrem 37-jährigen Werk hat sich die südkoreanische Künstlerin auf ihr persönliches Leben bezogen. Im Herbst 2019 stellt Kimsooja einen 6 mal 2,4 mal 2,6 Meter großen Container auf den Platz vor die Kathedrale von Poitiers (s. Kunstforum Nr. 265) und markiert damit ihren Abschied von New York, wo sie, seit den ersten Stipendien bis heute, fast 30 Jahre gelebt hatte. Ein radikaler Wendepunkt, denn seither pendelt Kimsooja zwischen Seoul und Paris, wo sie sich vielleicht in der Zukunft niederlassen wird, auch wenn sie längst im Unterwegssein zuhause ist. Der Container aber birgt nicht nur ihre Umzugskisten, sondern auch ihre künstlerische Weltsicht: Gelb, Rot, Blau, Weiß, Schwarz, Gelb, Rot, Blau … skandieren die leuchtenden Streifen auf seinen Wänden die alte koreanische Tradition eines Farbkosmos, der bis heute das analogische Denken der Künstlerin prägt: So entspricht Blau dem Holz, Rot dem Feuer, Gelb dem Erdmittelpunkt, Weiß dem Metall und Schwarz dem Wasser; die fünf Elemente finden ihr Pendant in den fünf Himmelsrichtungen und Jahreszeiten, die ihrerseits um ein Zentrum kreisen. Wie das Farbspektrum lebendig wird im Sonnenlicht, so erwacht der Kosmos im universalen Atemstrom zu beständiger Wandlung und Bewegung. Ein webender Austausch verbindet alle Elemente, Zeiten, Winde und Wesen zu unaufhörlich neuen Analogiereihen. Der Container hat den Titel „Bottari 1999 – 2019“ und holt damit den zweiten ebenso radikalen Wendepunkt ins Gedächtnis: Zur Biennale von Venedig 1999, stellt Kimsooja in Harald Szeemanns d’Apertutto ihren blauen „Bottari Truck in Exile“ vor eine Raum öffnende Spiegelwand. Das Vehikel ist Zeitzeuge ihrer Abschiedsreise von Korea, als ihr fester Wohnsitz in New York entschieden war. In elf Tagen hatte sie 2.727 Kilometer zurückgelegt und in den Orten ihrer Erinnerung die Einwohner um ausgediente Kleider und Bettüberwürfe gebeten. Gefaltet, eingewickelt, an den Stoffenden zusammengeknotet, so entstanden die traditionellen Reisebündel, die seidigen, farbenreichen „Bottaris“, die bald zum Leitmotiv ihrer Arbeit werden sollten. Zwischen den anwachsenden Bergen von Bottaris auf der offenen Ladefläche des Lasters sitzend fuhr sie über Bergpässe und Feldwege: „Cities on the Move – 2.727 Kilometers Bottari Truck“ hieß diese erste gefilmte Performance.

• Als Artist in Residence am PS1, hatte die Künstlerin 1992 in ihrem New Yorker Atelier zum ersten Mal den skulpturalen Aspekt ihrer eigenen Reisebündel gesehen. Von jeher war sie an die Gestik gewöhnt, Kleider, Hausrat, Bücher mit den Bettüberwürfen, die traditionell in jede Familie gehörten, zusammenzubinden. Auf diesen Tüchern, den kunstvoll gewirkten Ybulbos, wurde geruht, geliebt, geschlafen, darin wurden Säuglinge auf den Rücken gebunden und getragen, Kranke und Tote transportiert. Die Funktionen der Ybulbos beschreiben also einen Existenzbogen. 1994 hatte die Künstlerin in Korea ihre erste Installation photographiert: Bottaris auf der Türschwelle eines verlassenen Hauses, im südkoreanischen Dorf Yangdong, der Umgebung von Gyeongju. Die leuchtend farbigen, kunstvoll gewirkten Bottaris als Spuren von Angst, Hast und Flucht vor diktatorischer Unterdrückung. Dieser politische Hintergrund prägt die Bilder der Performance-Reise, „Cities on the Move – 2.727 Kilometers Bottari Truck“. Die Gesten des Zusammenfaltens, Bündelns, Knotens hatten den Rhythmus dieser Zeitreise bestimmt. Als Bottari der Gegenwart hatte die Künstlerin sich selbst verstanden, die auf ihrer Reise in die Zukunft versucht, Spuren der Vergangenheit zu sammeln. Denn die ausgedienten Kleider und Bettüberwürfe mit ihren Gerüchen und eingeprägten Gesten sind für Kimsooja vor allem dies: Erinnerungsvehikel menschlicher Gegenwart. Ähnlich wie Photographien bezeugen sie vergangenes Leben.

• In diesem Sinn hatte Kimsooja im Jahr 1995, zum 15. Jahrestag des Massakers von Gwangju, auch hier abgelegte Kleidung und Bett-Tücher gesammelt. Die südkoreanische Stadt war weltweit bekannt geworden durch den von Studenten angeführten, massiven Aufstand der demokratischen Bewegung, die vom Militärregime im Mai 1980 brutal niedergeschlagen worden war. Kimsooja baut kein Monument. „Sewing into Walking“ heißt ihre Performance: Die Künstlerin schleppt Bottari um Bottari in den Wald des Massenfriedhofs, und deckt im langsamen Gehen die alten Kleider und Ybulbos über die Erde, als müßte sie heilend gewärmt werden, als müßte den Toten, die Umarmung ihrer Nachbarn nachgetragen werden. So näht Kimsooja tatsächlich die Vergangenheit in die Gegenwart, näht Zeiträume, Entstehen und Vergehen zusammen. Auf ihrem Weg, in ihrem „Walking“, tritt sie zum ersten Mal als verkörperte Nadel auf, die in ihrer Vertikalität die horizontale Kleiderschicht mit der Erde verbindet.

• In dieser Künstlerauffassung eines konzeptuellen Nähens, hatte sie 1984 in Seoul, nach ihrem Studium der Malerei, die Arbeit „The Earth and the Heaven“ aus Seidenresten zusammengenäht, ein Achsenkreuz aus den Farbfeldern der fünf Elemente. Was sie daran interessierte, war die Gestik an der Grenze, die Nadelbewegung selbst, in ihrem verbindenden Durchqueren unterer und oberer Schichten, die Kimsooja wie selbstverständlich auf die Zeit, den Raum und das Universum bezieht. Die Bewegung der Hände, wenn sie die vier Stoffzipfel der farbenreichen Bett-Tücher unter- und übereinander führen und einen Knoten festzurren, ist der nähenden Geste vergleichbar. Wenn aus dem Falten und Bündeln des Tuches nun eine kugelförmige Dreidimensionalität entsteht, erscheint es für Kimsooja wiederum selbstverständlich, darin eine Welt zu sehen. Damit nähert sie sich, so könnte man es sehen, über ihr experimentell künstlerisches Tun, einem Mathematiker und Philosophen der europäischen frühen Aufklärung: Leibniz war aus dem spirituell-körperlichen Doppelcharakter des Tuches und dessen Faltungen, die er eingehend betrachtet hatte, die Einsicht hergeleitet, das gesamte Universum sei ein einziger kontinuierlicher, sich wandelnder Körper, der verschiedene Gestalten annimmt. Die Möglichkeit dieser Parallele zeigt die transkulturelle Dimension, die Kimsoojas Weltsicht öffnet.

• In einer Reihe von Performances zwischen 1999 und 2005 erweitert sie die Logik ihrer Künstlerkonzeption, Nadel zu sein. Als unbewegliche Gestalt im grauen Gewand wird sie in der Rückenansicht für den Zuschauer zum Medium, das vermag, den Atem und die Wahrnehmung zu verlangsamen, den Betrachter hineinzuziehen in verdichtete Situationen des Zeitraums. So sehen wir sie 1999 in Japan, als „A Needle Woman – Kitakyushu“, horizontal auf einem langen, glatten Felsen ausgestreckt; ihr Körper verbindet sich mit der grauen Gesteinsformation, zeichnet die Grenzlinie zwischen Himmel und Erde nach. Der Zuschauer, auf ihren Rücken schauend, atmet wie sie den offenen Himmelsraum und dessen Stille, teilt ihr Erleben. Ein Jahr später steht sie in Indien an der Böschung des Yamuna River; vorübertreibende Verbrennungsreste zeigen sein stetiges Strömen. Kimsooja nennt sich hier „A Laundry Woman – Yamuna River“, schaut in dunstige horizontlose Ferne, weiß, der Fluß wird weiterströmen, auch nach ihrem Lebensende. In folgenden großen Video-Reihen, steht sie im Mittelpunkt von dicht bevölkerten Metropolen, wie Tokio, Mexico City, London oder Kairo. Ihre unbewegliche graue Gestalt erscheint als Seismograph im Zeitstrom der vorüberziehenden Menschenmassen; ein Strom, der kaum innehält, wenn das Gesicht eines Vorübergehenden dem ihren begegnet. In einer zweiten großen Serie bereist sie ebenso als unbeweglicher Zeitzeuge, konzentriert auf ihr physisch gegenwärtiges Sein, die Krisenherde der Zeit, Havanna, Rio de Janeiro, Jerusalem, N’Djamena, Sana’a, Patan und Nepal. Fast einem Kriegsreporter gleich, muß sie in dieser zweiten Performance-Reihe, oftmals um ihr Leben fürchten. Ihre Präsenz bewegt sich also auch hier an einer Grenze. Die Identifikation mit der physischen Zeugenschaft der Künstlerin, mag im Betrachter eine neue Aufmerksamkeit für das Weltgeschehen wecken. Die Video-Installation der zweiten Reihen war 2005 in Aperto zu sehen.

• Vom Phänomen der Nadelbewegung, vom Prinzip ihres Verbindens verschiedener Raum- und Zeitschichten ausgehend, entwickelt Kimsooja von nun an erweiterte Bildkonzeptionen, indem sie das Phänomen des Spiegels, das schon angeklungen war, zum Thema macht. Denn auch der Spiegel führt verschiedene Raumschichten zusammen. Wie die Nadel bleibt der Spiegel unsichtbar, erschafft Bilder und verschwindet mit ihnen. Wie die Nadel markiert der Spiegel eine Grenze des Raums. Auch sein Auftritt bezeichnet eine Grenze der Zeit, den haarscharfen Augenblick, wenn Zeit erst geschieht. Im Palacio de Cristales in Madrid verband Kimsooja dieses Agieren des Spiegels mit ihrem ruhigen Atemgeräusch. „To breathe – A Mirror Woman“ hieß die Arbeit, im Jahr 2006: Einer lebendigen Bestimmungsgröße des Raums gleich, so steht sie als zierliche schwarze Gestalt auf einem grenzauflösenden Spiegelboden, inmitten von hohen, funkelnden Glaswänden, die mit einem optischen Prisma beschichtet sind. Kein Halt nirgends: Unter den Füßen werden die Glaskuppeln zum schwankenden Abgrund, der Körper schwebt im Raum, dessen Grenzen zerstieben in einem Feuerwerk der Spektralfarben. Atmender, Licht durchpulster Raum. Damit öffnet Kimsooja ihre Performance für den Betrachter, der hier nun selbst die Bewegungen von Raum und Zeit ausloten kann.

• Das ist der Absprung für die Künstlerin in eine bis dahin nicht gekannte Freiheit, die Welt aus dem Blickwinkel des Ein- und Ausfaltens von Stoffbahnen zu verstehen: Kimsooja findet ihre Bilder auf der Straße und in der Natur. So beobachtet sie die Wäscher in den Armenvierteln von Mumbai: die daraus entstandene Videoinstallation heißt, „Mumbai: A Laundry Field“, 2007–2008. Die Kamera schafft eine Analogie zwischen Körper und Tuch, wenn die Wäscher ihre harte Arbeit, das Bürsten und Reiben, das Ausspülen, Wringen und Ausschlagen der hoch auffliegenden, spritzenden Stoffe unterbrechen und sich selbst unter den Wasserschlauch stellen. Daneben Bilder von der alten Gleichung Habitat und Habit, wenn Obdachlose ihren Schlafplatz auf der Straße und sich selbst mit Tüchern schützen.

• Die seltenen Weltgegenden, die von menschlicher Zerstörung noch bewahrt sind, sind das Thema in einer Folge von acht Filmen, die das unaufhörliche Verwandeln im Austauschtanz der Elemente beobachtet: „Earth-Water-Fire-Air“, 2009 – 2010. Achtmal zeigt die Kamera deren fließende Interdependenz: Das innere Feuer der Erde und seine rotglühende Lava erstarren zu schwarzen, noch weiterglühenden Gesteinsflammen; das Feuer kann ohne die Luft nicht sein; eine Wasseroberfläche gleicht Bodenwellen; eine Meereswelle schlägt meterhoch gegen einen Felsen, während ihre im Sonnenlicht aufwehende Gischt das Feuerwerk der Spektralfarben entfacht – unmögliche, alltägliche Verbindung von Feuer und Wasser. Was Kimsooja zeigt, ist das haarscharf austarierte Zusammenwirken der Elemente und ihrer Kräfte, deren Wandlungen ohne unser Zutun beständig neue Bilder erzeugt, an der Zeitgrenze des Augenblicks. Kimsooja zeigt die andere Seite: Als gelte es für den Betrachter ein Atemreservoir zu schaffen, trägt sie unermüdlich Bilder zusammen aus einer weiterlebenden Harmonie. Ihr Künstlercredo heißt verbinden, heilen, weben, statt trennen, zerreißen und verwerfen. „Thread-Routes“ ist der Titel ihrer bis heute weitergeführten Folge, die 2010 begann, und bisher sechs abgeschlossene Filme umfaßt: Quer durch die Welt folgt die Künstlerin hier den selten gewordenen Spinnerinnen, Weberinnen, Klöpplerinnen, Gerbern und Stoffdruckern mit der Kamera. Auf den Gebirgspfaden des Altiplano von Peru beobachtet sie, wie alteingeübte Hände Schafswolle zu Fäden zwirbeln, im Gehen, die Spindel kreiseln lassen, irgendwo unterwegs einen Haken in die Erde schlagen, Fäden spannen und ihr Weben beginnen. Der Wiederholungstanz uralter Gesten beseelt von Afrika bis Kroatien diese Filme, deren Bilder immer wieder das Weben des Windes, der Wolken, des Lichts und der Schatten verbinden mit den fabrizierenden Händen und ihren Fadenwegen. Die Akteure sind in jedem Filmabspann mit Namen aufgeführt, oftmals zusammengenähte Namen aus den ursprünglichen und später aufgezwungenen Kulturen. Vier dieser Filme waren im Herbst 2019 in Poitiers zu sehen. Nichts ist nostalgisch; die Bilder leben aus dem dokumentierten Tun heraus.

• Nichts manipulieren, nichts hinzufügen, das ist ihr Schaffensprinzip. Kimsooja, die ihre Arbeit aus ihrer pragmatischen Beobachtung entwickelt, anerkennt nur ein Künstlervorbild: John Cage. Kurz nach ihrem Studium hatte sie 1985 zur Biennale von Paris dessen weißen Container gesehen. Im Innenraum seiner Leere und Stille war an der Wand ein einziger Satz zu lesen: „Whether you try to make it or not, the sound is heard“. Diese Worte haben die Künstlerin seither begleitet und bestärkt in ihrer Künstlerhaltung eines „Non-Making“, in ihrer Überzeugung, keine Gegenstände herzustellen. Bis heute ist sie davon nicht abgerückt. Während ihrer Ausstellung in Poitiers, im Herbst 2019, sind die Besucher aufgefordert, an einem „Archive of Mind“ mitzuwirken. Im Palais der Ducs d’Aquitaine steht, wie zuvor im Museum für zeitgenössische Kunst in Seoul, der große ovale Holztisch mit seinen Schemeln. Die Gäste bedienen sich aus großen Lehmklumpen, setzen sich an den Tisch, drehen ihre Handvoll Lehm zu einer Kugel und hinterlassen sie dort. Die Stille öffnet das Gehör für ein leises auf- und absteigendes Wassergurgeln, ein vertikales Echo auf die horizontalen Kreisbahnen am Tisch. Es dauert, bis eine Kugel sich formt. Die Wiederholungsgeste wird zum Alltagsfilter. Das Freigeben eines eigenen Bottari öffnet einen anderen Denkraum. Sich beteiligen, ohne zu besitzen, ohne zu besetzen.

• Diese Logik wird einen Kreis schließen, wenn Kimsooja im Verlauf von 2020 im Park der schwedischen Wanås Foundation, Leinen aussäen, seine blau blühenden Felder, seine Ernte und schließlich das Fadenspinnen und Weben von groben Leinwänden beobachten wird. Keine Objekte, keine Bilder. Auch nicht im Dezember 2020, wenn sie in der Kathedrale von Metz ein Fenster aus dichroitischem Glas herstellen wird: eigentlicher Autor werden die Farbbrechungen des Lichts sein. Was sie erschafft, sind Seherfahrungen, mit Leibniz gesagt, ein schauendes Denken.

• 글로벌 아티스트 김수자(金守子). 그가 매머드 전시를 열고 있다. 프랑스의 중세도시 푸아티에에서 열리고 있는 비엔날레 형식의 제1회〈트라베르세/김수자 (Traversées/Kimsooja)〉(2019. 10. 12~ 2020. 1. 19). 전시제목인 ‘트라베르세’는 ‘통과(crossing)’ 또는 ‘가로지르기 (traverse)’라는 뜻이다. 전쟁 이주 망명 등 오늘의 ‘글로벌 위기’를 반영하는 주제다. 여기에, 유목(nomad)의 표상인 ‘보따리 작가’ 김수자를 주인공으로 내세웠다. 그는 사운드를 아우르는 장소특정적 설치와 퍼포먼스 오브제 비디오 필름 라이트설치 등 총 15점의 대형 작품을 발표했다. 또 주제에 부합하는 글로벌 작가를 초대하는 큐레이터 역할까지 맡았다. 실로 김수자 예술의 빛나는 무대가 아닐 수 없다. 김수자와 초대작가 14명은 도시 곳곳에 흩어져 있는 13개의 역사적인 기념 건축에 작품을 선보였다. 이 전시에 주목해 작가와 인터뷰를 가졌다. 내용은 크게 두 갈래다. 하나는, 〈트라베르세/김수자〉의 전시 개념과 공간 매핑, ‘글로벌 위기’에 대응하는 개별 작품을 소개했다. 국제적으로 널리 알려진 참여작가 간의 조형적 연계성을 리뷰했다. 또 하나는, 김수자의 ‘관객-주체’ 퍼포먼스, 무지갯빛 스펙트럼, 실재와 가상이 혼재하는 거울 설치 등 근자의 작품에 주목해 그 조형론을 깊게 파고들었다. 그리하여 바느질과 보따리 같은 모국주의 개인사에서 출발해 인간의 존재론 같은 보편적 예술 성취로 이어지는 작품 여정을 조망한다.

• Art : 김수자는 작년 연말에 뉴욕 스튜디오를 철수했다. 한국으로 캠프를 이동하는 중이다. 작가로서 큰 전기를 맞고 있다. 작가 이전에 자연인으로 본다면, 수구초심(首丘初心)이라고나 할까, 고향으로의 회귀의식이 발동한 것인가. 그 소회를 듣고 싶다.

• Kim : 수구초심으로 한국으로 돌아온 건 아니고, 그저 한 자연인으로서 나를 필요로 하는 가족의 일원을 돌보기 위해 한국에 와 있을 수밖에 없는 상황이 됐다. 정확하게 말하면 ‘돌아왔다’기보다는 ‘와 있다’고 해야 할 것 같다. 한국에 있다 해도 과연 얼마나 한국에서 산다고 할 수 있을지 모르겠다. 한국선 거의 섬에 살듯이 지내기 때문이다. 나는 오랜 기간 뉴욕에서 화상이나 컬렉터, 미술관의 아무런 지원 없이 주로 유럽의 지원에 의존해 작업해 왔다. 2000년대 이후 점점 상업성이 극으로 치닫고 있는 뉴욕이 더 이상 나에게 의미가 없다고 판단해 떠날 계획을 이미 갖고 있었다.(사실 인텔렉추얼한 측면에서 뉴욕을 아끼는 부분이 아직도 남아 있다. 뉴욕은 역시 내가 그 속에서 죽고 싶은 마지막 도시이다.) 1년 전만 해도 파리를 유럽의 베이스로 삼아 그곳으로 스튜디오를 옮기려 했다. 이번에 근 20년간 거주한(그래 봐야 실제로는 10년도 채 못 살았지만) 뉴욕의 이스트빌리지 아파트 짐을 모두 컨테이너에 실어 프랑스의 푸아티에로 운송하는 새로운 작업 〈보따리 1999-2019〉은 애초 파리에 정착하기 위해 계획된 것이었다. 그런데 그 사이에 한국으로 돌아와야 하는 상황이 벌어진 것이다. 그 이전에 보다 경제적인 도시 베를린으로 옮겨 보려고 6개월간 오가며 지내 봤지만, 정붙이기 어려웠다. 여러 우여곡절도 있었지만, 역시 나는 파리가 수월하다. 프랑스 정부나 자치단체, 그리고 미술관으로부터 많은 지원을 받아 오고 있다.

주제는 ‘트라베르세’, 통과 혹은 가로지르기

• Art : 이번 인터뷰에서 다룰 중점 사안은 현재 프랑스 중부 도시 푸아티에 전역에서 열리고 있는 대규모 프로젝트 〈트라베르세/김수자(Traversées/Kimsooja)〉다. 우선 ‘트라베르세(traversées)’는 ‘통과(crossing)’ 또는 ‘가로지르기(traverse)’라는 뜻이다. 이게 바로 전시 주제인데, 무엇보다 이 전시의 시스템이 아주 특별하다. 여느 국제전과 달리 한 명의 예술가를 선정해, 그 예술가가 자신의 작품뿐만 아니라 다른 작가들의 작품까지 도시 전역에 전시하는 방식이다. 그 첫 번째 축제의 〈트라베르세〉를 이끄는 주인공으로 김수자가 선정됐다. 그러니까 김수자는 작품 발표뿐만 아니라 큐레이터 역할까지 맡았다. 주연배우와 감독을 겸하는 일이니, 작가로서 이보다 더 큰 영광이 또 있을까 싶다. 푸아티에 예술축제의 설립 배경, 미션과 비전은 무엇인가?

• Kim : 푸아티에는 파리에서 보르도 방향인 남서쪽으로 1시간 반 거리에 있는 인구 9만 5,000명 정도의 작은 중세도시다. 한국인에게는 다소 생소하지만 한때 프랑스의 수도이기도 했고, 푸아티에 전투로 유명했던 아랍권과의 전쟁 등을 겪으며 끊임없이 외부의 도전을 받았다. 그러니까 실제로 과거에 수많은 주변국가와 그 문화의 트라베르세가 일어났던 곳이다. 또 이 푸아티에 전투로 인해 ‘유럽’이라는 개념이 탄생한 곳으로도 유명하다. 또한 현대미술에 지대한 영향을 미친 프랑스 철학자 미셸 푸코(Michel Foucault)의 탄생지이기도 하며, 종교와 교육도시로도 널리 알려져 있다. 그래서 애초에 40여 명이 참여하는 비엔날레로 기획한 이 프로젝트의 전체 제목이 〈트라베르세〉이고, 초대작가를 한 명으로 압축하여 트라베르세의 의미를 오래 탐구해 온 작가에게 전시 콘텐츠를 전권위임(Carte Blanche)함으로써, 그 첫 에디션의 제목을 〈트라베르세/김수자〉로 시작한 것은 이 비엔날레의 독특한 성격을 대변한다. 특히 도시의 진보적인 정치 성향과 현 시장의 이민과 난민 수용의 포용정책이 프로젝트의 추진 동력이 됐다. 무엇보다 도시 전체를 하나의 무대로 삼아 한 작가의 작업으로 매핑(mapping)할 뿐 아니라, 작가와 이번 전시에 연계될 수 있는 다른 작가의 작업을 초대할 수 있는 권한과 지원을 해 준 것은 세계 어디서도 유례를 찾아볼 수 없는 비엔날레 형식이라고 할 수 있겠다. 〈트라베르세/김수자〉는 푸아티에 시장인 알랭 클래이(Alain Claeys)가 푸아티에 출신이며 전 루브르미술관 관장이자 2015년 한불수교 130주년 기념행사를 총지휘한 앙리 루아레트(Henri Loyrette)의 제의를 받아들임으로써 만들어졌다. 전 퐁피두센터-메스 디렉터이자 현재 팔레드도쿄 관장인 엠마 라비뉴(Emma Lavigne)와 독립큐레이터 엠마누엘 드 몽가종(Emmanuelle de Montgazon)을 공동 예술감독에 임명함으로써 그 첫발을 내딛게 됐다. 시장은 이 행사를 통해 푸아티에를 국제사회와 국제미술의 지형 속에 자리매김한다는 취지와 함께 최근 유럽의 가장 첨예한 이슈인 전쟁, 난민, 이주 문제를 전적으로 포용하는 입장을 표명하고자 했다. 또한 푸아티에에는 매우 흥미로운 콩포르모데른(Confort Moderne)아트센터가 있지만 아직 현대미술관이 없다. 중세도시에 활력을 불어넣을 수 있는 도시의 중심에 자리잡은 상징적인 건물이며 최근까지 법원으로 사용된 아키텐 공국의 궁전(Palais des ducs d’Aquitaine)을 새로운 현대미술 공간으로 전환해 시민에게 선사한다는 의미도 크다.

• Art : ‘트라베르세’, 이른바 ‘경계 넘기’ ‘가로지르기’는 익히 잘 알려져 있듯이, 그동안 김수자가 견지해 온 작품 주제다. 1992∼93년 뉴욕 PS1창작스튜디오 작업실에서 태동된 〈보따리〉 시리즈 이후 김수자의 작품은 유목(nomad)의 표상으로 세계의 주목을 받았다. 이번 푸아티에 예술 축제에서는 이 트라베르세의 개념이 어떻게 구체적으로 작품에 실현되었는가. 〈보따리〉가 푸아티에라는 사이트에서 어떻게 새롭게 구현되었는가. 전시 내용을 구체적으로 살펴보자.

• Kim : 우선, 두 명의 공동디렉터는 유서 깊은 중세도시 전체를 하나의 거대한 캔버스로 삼아 작업할 수 있도록 전적으로 나를 믿고 지원하며 〈트라베르세/김수자〉의 길 안내자가 되어 주었다. 나로서는 큰 영광이었다. 또한 푸아티에라는 도시의 ‘열쇠’를 한 작가에게 넘겨줄 수 있는 시장과 디렉터들의 용기와 실험정신이 없었다면, 이런 대규모 비엔날레 형식의 개인/공공 프로젝트가 이처럼 새롭게 탄생될 수는 없었을 것이다. 말 그대로 ‘드림 큐레이터(Dream Curator)팀’이었다.(Curator는 ‘신경쓰다’ ‘돌봐 주다’를 뜻하는 라틴어 ‘curare’에서 나왔다.) 우선 트라베르세라는 타이틀을 받았을 때, 국제적인 지형도에서 제일 먼저 떠오른 아이디어는 그동안 내가 오래 계획해 온 유럽으로의 베이스 이동, 특히 뉴욕에서 파리로의 이주를 실행할 가장 적절한 시점이라는 것이었다. 나의 삶 자체를 옮기는 작업인 〈보따리 1999-2019〉는 지난 20년간 살아온 뉴욕 이스트빌리지의 아파트에 쌓인 나의 일상생활의 모든 짐을 오방색 컨테이너에 싣고 푸아티에로 옮겨 피난처로서의 상징성을 지닌 성당(Cathedrale de Saint-Pierre) 앞에 내려놓는 여정이었다. 반면 푸아티에 도시 내의 지형도는 팔레(Palais des ducs d’Aquitaine)를 중심축으로 십자를 그으며 구도시와 맞닿는다는 생각으로 팔레로부터 매핑을 했다. 그래서 팔레의 중심에 〈마음의 기하학(Archive of Mind)>을 설치해 시민이 함께 모이는 중심축으로 상정했고, 구도심을 관통하는 오래 닫힌 팔레의 문을 열어 중세부터 중심 길이었던 카테드랄 길(rue de Cathedrale)을 통과해 성십자미술관(Musée Saint-Croix)과 콩포르모데른 아트센터에 이르는 긴 산책로의 좌우측 군데군데에 산재한 성당과 교육시설, 회랑 등 도시의 역사적 건물들을 문맥에 따라 경험하도록 계획했다. 각 사이트가 전체와 서로 연계를 가지면서도 각기 하나의 시각적 의미론적 중심으로서 내러티브를 갖도록 했다.

• Art : 《e-flux》에 실린 컨테이너 〈보따리 1999-2019〉가 인상적이다. 한국의 보따리가 컨테이너로 치환된 작품이다. 한마디로 보따리의 변주인데, 이 작품의 함의가 대단히 중요하다. 이주 이동 유목의 의미를 담고 있는 보따리라는 이름을 유지하면서도 실제 보따리 형상은 컨테이너로 바뀌었다. 보따리의 ‘문화 번역’이라고 해야 할까. 컨테이너 표면은 5가지 원소(목 화 토 금 수)를 표상하는 한국의 전통 오방색으로 색띠를 그려 넣었다. 보따리의 원천을 유지하면서도 실제 작가 자신의 이주 상황을 그대로 드러내는, 그래서 리얼리티가 강한 작품으로 보였다. 사실 2016년부터 〈연역적 오브제〉라는 입체작품을 발표했는데, 이 역시 색동천의 변주가 아닌가. 강철을 용접한 난형(卵形)의 형태에 기본 방향(동 남 중앙 서 북)과 전통 오방색으로 아주 현대적으로 입체화한 작품으로 보인다.

• 〈보따리 1999-2019〉는 지난 8월 말 뉴욕의 짐을 컨테이너에 실어 푸아티에로 보내면서 말 그대로대서양을 횡단해 설치한 작품이다.

• Art : 김수자는 큐레이터 자격으로 일본의 타다시 가와마타(Tadashi Kawamata), 인도의 수보드 굽타(Subodh Gupta)를 초대했다. 이 작가들은 우리나라에서도 개인전을 개최한 바 있고, 세계적으로도 널리 알려져 있다. 또 콩고의 새미 발로지(Sammy Baloji)도 참가했다. 그 외 초대작가와 김수자 작품과의 개연성이랄까, 이번 전시 프로젝트와의 관련성에서 들여다보는 일이 중요할 것 같다.

• Kim : 이번 전시에서 개인적으로 대단히 흥미로웠고 영감을 준 요소는 내가 이번 테마와 연계되는, 혹은 나의 작업과 연계되는 다른 동료작가를 초대해, 내 작업과의 연계성을 공유하며 〈트라베르세〉의 의미를 심화하고 확장하는 과정이었다. 예를 들자면, 나는 타다시 가와마타의 작업을 남성적 직조 행위로 본다. 그의 작업은 내가 2010년부터 진행해 오고 있는 〈실의 궤적(Thread Routes)〉 16mm 필름 프로젝트를 맨 처음 발상할 당시인 2002년, 벨기에의 브루주(Brugge)에서 보빈 레이스(Bobbin Lace)를 짜고 있는 한 여성을 보면서 바로 병치하게 된 남성적 직조 행위로서의 건축 행위를 연상시킨다. 텍스타일에서 여성적 직조 행위와 건축에서 남성적 직조 행위는 그동안 내가 〈실의 궤적〉 필름 속에 병치해 왔다. 이러한 건축적 요소를 이번에 팔레의 입구 기둥에 설치한 가와마타의 〈둥지〉를 통해 물리적으로 잘 병치할 수 있었다.

메인 작가와 큐레이터를 겸하다

• Art : 가와마타는 기존의 건축에 기생하는 나무로 된 집 혹은 둥지 같은 형상의 설치작품을 통해 구축과 해체의 모호한 풍경을 연출한다. 시작도 끝도 아닌, 일종의 이항대립의 중간지대와 같은 차원은 마치 김수자의 〈보따리〉가 이제 막 떠나려는 상황과 이제 막 도착한 상황, 그 두 상황의 사이 혹은 공존과도 통한다.

• Kim : 공감한다. 관객들이 가와마타의 〈둥지〉를 지나 팔레 내부로 들어가면 중심에 설치된 〈마음의 기하학〉(2019)을 체험할 수 있다. 여기서 보따리와 구(球)로의 이행을 보다 더 구체적이고 물리적으로, 또 심리학적으로 이해하게 된다. 이것은 지적한 대로 형식적으로 하나의 가능태로서의 보따리가 형성과 해체의 가능성을 공유하고 있는 동시에 이 전시가 강조하는 중요한 요소인 ‘환대와 보호(Hospitality and Protection)’라는 측면, 즉 미셀 푸코가 말하는 헤테로토피아(Heterotopia)의 특수한 장소성을 가지면서도 질 들뢰즈(Gilles Deleuze)가 말하는 환대와 환영의 의미를 동시에 지닌다. 그래서 이번 전시의 첫 입구에 가와마타의 작업을 선보였다. 전시의 중심축이 되는 18m 길이의 타원형 테이블 위에서의 퍼포먼스 〈마음의 기하학〉은 팔레 내의 다른 두 설치, 과거 재판관들의 개인 사무실 공간이었던 투르 모베르종(Tour Maubergeon)의 〈숨쉬기(To Breathe)〉 거울과 숨소리 설치에서 다시 아치형 천장과 그 구조의 반사로 인해 조성된 타원형의 가상적 공간을 만든다.

• Art : 김수자 예술에서 퍼포먼스의 중요성을 빼놓을 없다. 흔히 ‘작가-주체’의 퍼포먼스로는 〈바늘 여인〉이나 〈빨래하는 여인〉처럼 작가 스스로를 공간의 축이자 시간의 축으로 설정하는 작품이 있다. 그런데 근자의 〈마음의 기하학〉에서는 ‘관객-주체’의 퍼포먼스로 이동했다. 〈마음의 기하학〉은 많은 사람이 작은 찰흙 구(球)를 빚어 텅 빈 거대한 타원형 테이블을 채우는 작업이다. 단순히 관객 참여형이라고만 평가하기에는 작품의 의미가 대단히 깊고 넓다. 작품의 주제가우주라든가 우리 인간의 존재론과 같은 문제로 이동했다. 각기 다른 사람이 만들어 낸 각기 다른 형태의 찰흙 구는 인간의 마음이라는 소우주이고, 그 소우주가 모여 은하수와 같은 대우주를 만들어 낸다. 여기에 우주의 소리를 연상시키는 사운드 〈구의 궤적〉이 조합된다. ‘오디오 퍼포먼스’라고 해야 할까. 결국 촉각 시각 청각이 총동원되는 작품이다.

• Kim : 팔레에는 특별히 이번에 푸아티에시에서 커미션하여 모로코에서 새로 제작한 아프리카 챕터인 〈실의 궤적 Vl〉과 함께 전체 프로젝트의 하나의 센터로서 각기 다른 형식(설치 퍼포먼스 사운드 필름 라이트)으로 전체 프로젝트의 스펙트럼을 대변하게끔 설치하였다. 또한 가와마타의 〈터널〉은 오랜 세월 막혀 있던 구도시로 통로를 열어 주는 매개 작업이었다. 이렇게 다다른 카테드랄 길은 2012년 런던올림픽 때 참가국으로만 제작된 〈숨쉬기: 깃발〉 이후 국가를 상징하는 모든 존재하는 국기를(공식적이든 비공식적이든 차별 없이 알파벨 순서로, 여기서 남한과 북한의 국기가 오브랩된다) 사용해 재편집한 비디오 작업에서 추출한 이미지들로 초국가적 깃발을 제작해, 카테드랄 길을 따라 컨테이너 보따리가 있는 생피에르 성당까지 설치되어 뮤지엄 쪽으로 안내하게 된다. 여기서 또 시리아 난민의 도착 장소 중 하나이고 근년에 가장 회자되었던 그리스의 레스보아 섬에서 발견한 난민의 구명조끼로 제작한, 그리스 작가이자 건축가 아킬레아스 수라스(Achilleas Souras)의 돔 형식의 설치 〈SOS(Save our Souls)〉를 만나게 된다. 바다 내음과 소금기가 그대로 묻어 있는 이 작업은 성탄절 전날 밤 설치 일부가 불에 타는 안타까운 일이 발생했다. 좀 더 지켜봐야겠지만 현 시점의 유럽과 프랑스의 여러 정치 종교 사회적 문제를 암시한다고 생각한다. 결국 이 사건은 불안정한 시대를 대변하는 이 작업의 의미를 더욱 강화하는 사건이 됐다.

• Art : 구명조끼를 작품에 끌어들이는 다른 작가도 있지만, 아킬레아스 수라스의 경우 건축가여서인지 단순히 구명조끼를 난민의 상징으로 외형적으로 돋보이게 하기보다는 대단히 구축적인 조형이 돋보인다. 가와마타의 작품 〈둥지〉와 〈터널〉과도 구조적으로 잘 어울린다.

• Kim : 19세의 젊은 그리스 건축가 아킬레아스 수라스의 작업 역시 이민과 난민의 문제, 또 환대의 문제를 제기한다. 나는 그의 작업과 〈보따리〉의 의미와 형식적 유형을 여기서 또 한번 연계하면서 내용적 유사성을 제시했다. 내가 초대한 작가들에게서는 여타의 유사한 재료를 쓰거나 작업을 하는 작가들에게 흔히 발견되는 오리지널리티에 대한 의문은 들지 않았다. 그 의미의 진정성과 형식과 내용의 일관성 때문이다. 일단 뮤지엄 광장에 들어서면 리크리트 티라바냐(Rirkrit Travanija)의 수직수평 구조로 대나무를 사용한 건축적 미로와 중심에 위치한 찻집 설치와 다도(茶道)를 아우른 작업 〈무제(the infinite dimension of smallness)〉(2018) 역시 그가 오래 유지해 온 헤테로토피아적 공간 제시와 환대를 대변하는 나눔의 퍼포먼스의 연장선에 있는 작업이다.

• Art : 이번 프로젝트에 입체 설치작품 이외에 퍼포먼스의 비중도 높은 것 같다. 리밍웨이(Lee Mingwei)의 〈수선 프로젝트〉는 한눈에 봐도 김수자의 작품과 연결된다. 바느질, 이른바 직조라는 개념인데, 남성작가의 바느질이 흥미롭다.

• Kim : 미술관 내부에 설치한 리밍웨이의 〈수선 프로젝트〉 역시 비폭력주의와 환대 내지는 관용적 태도와 맥을 같이 하는 남성의 바느질 작업이다. 그의 작업은 전자의 남성적 직조라기보다는 여성성에 기초한 남성의 직조로 보이는 러빙 케어(Loving Care)의 의미를 늘 추구하고 있다. 그의 예술적 접근 역시 비폭력주의와 나눔, 포용, 그리고 상처 치유와 통합과 하모니를 추구한다. 그런 점에서 내 작업과 맥락이 가까이 다가와 있다. 그러한 일련의 접근은 미술관 2층에 설치된 〈실의 궤적 l, ll, lll〉에서 바느질, 마름질, 염색, 레이스 뜨기, 직조, 쿠킹, 노마딕 생활상과 각 챕터의 지역성에 기초한 역사적 건축물과 자연과 현지의 수공예적 감수성과 미학의 병치를 통해 종합적으로 통합되어 선보인다. 콩고 출신의 작가 세미 발로지 역시 구리 탄피를 녹여 십자가를 만드는 일련의 과정과 그 십자가를 목에 매단 교회의 소년합창단을 통해 과거 콩고의 식민지배의 역사와 문화를 성스러운 안무와도 같은 필름과 설치작업 〈Tales of the Copper Cross Garden〉(2017)에 담아냈다. 폭력을 치유로 전환시키고 있는 이 작가의 작업 역시 나의 감수성과 방향성과 결을 함께한다고 생각된다.

• Art : 식기를 소재로 삼아 다양한 입체 설치작품을 펼치는 인도작가 수보드 굽타는 이번에 요리 퍼포먼스로 각광을 받았다.

• Kim : 굽타는 푸아티에 건축센터(Maison d’Architecture)에서 오래된 부엌의 소스팬과 냄비 등을 이용하여 하나의 투과성 있는 독특한 집을 만들고 그 안을 부엌 겸 식당으로 꾸며 인도음식 퍼포먼스 〈요리 세계〉(2017)를 펼쳤다. 작가가 관객과 대화하며 본인의 레시피를 가미한 인도의 거리음식을 나누는 퍼포먼스는 문화적 건축적 미학적이었고, 이식된 공동체를 오감과 함께 느낄 수 있는 풍부한 경험이었다. 나 역시 2018년 중국의 인촨비엔날레(Yinchuan Biennale)에서 시도한 장소특정적인 죽(porridge) 프로젝트를 푸아티에 현지 조건에 맞추어 실행하고 싶었지만, 10여 개의 프로젝트를 준비하느라 겨를이 없어 포기했다. 굽타와 한 공간의 블랙박스에 나는 뭄바이의 슬럼가와 공공빨래터 도비갓(dhobighat), 또 인산인해를 이루며 기차로 출퇴근하는 모습을 담은 〈뭄바이: 빨래터〉(2007)를 병치했다. 인도의 문화와 사회적 현주소를 편견 없이 있는 그대로 보여 주어 시너지 효과를 가져 온 프로젝트였다. 사실 이 작업은 나의 이불보 설치작업의 연장으로 보면 된다. 한편 유럽에서 가장 오래된 세례성당(Baptistère Saint-Jean)에서는 한국의 국악인 정마리가 정가를 불렀다. 지고한 순수미와 독특한 창법으로 〈영속하는 기쁨의 노래〉를 60분간 쉼 없이 노래하며 관객 모두에게 명상과 초월적 경험을 선사했다. 끊일 둣 이어지는 그녀의 숨막힐 듯 가녀린 목소리의 풀림은 마치 직조행위를 비물질화하여 바라보는 것 같은 연상작용을 불러일으켰다. 나는 그녀의 소리를 이 프로젝트의 미학적 정점에 놓고 싶었다.

오방색 스펙트럼, 우주의 빛

• Art : 이번에도 무지갯빛 효과를 자아내는 빛 작업을 선보였다. 김수자가 빛을 작품에 끌어들인 것은 2006년 스페인의 마드리드 크리스털 궁전의 설치작품 〈숨쉬기–거울여인〉(2016)에 이어 2013년 베니스비엔날레 한국관에서였다. 유리창에 회절격자 필름을 부착해 빛이 스며들면 무지갯빛 효과를 낼 수 있다. 전시공간은 마치 우주와 같은 스펙터클한 환경으로 바뀐다. 김수자가 비물질을 작품 재료로 끌어들인 것은 획기적인 변화다. 베니스에서는 빛이 스며드는 공간과는 대조적으로 빛과 소리가 완전히 차단된 적막한 공간을 조성하기도 했다. 외부 공간을 내부로 끌어들이는 빛 작업이 지속되고 있다. 빛을 작품에 끌어들이는 근본적인 이유는? 빛은 김수자 예술에서 어떤 역할을 맡고 있는가?

• Kim : 이 답변을 위해서는 색의 스펙트럼 이상의 의미를 갖고 있는 오방색과 십자, 보따리에 대한 내 생각을 먼저 이야기하는 것이 순서다. 근 40년 가까이 내가 끊임없이 실험해 온 지속적인 문제 중 하나는 화가로서의 시각을 견지하며 질문해 온 캔버스의 표면(surface), 나아가 경계(border), 캔버스를 지탱하고 있는 십자구조이다. 이 십자구조는 1980년 홍익대 대학원 졸업논문으로 발표했던 〈조형기호의 유전성–십자형 기호를 중심으로〉에서도 다루었다. 나는 칼 구스타브 융(Carl Gustav Jung, 1875∼961)의 만다라에서 보인 마음의 원형(Archive of Mind)에서 그 구조적 심리적 근원을 찾았다. 십자는 고대부터 현대에 이르기까지 구조적으로도 많은 작가가 거치지 않을 수 없는 터널과도 같은 것이다. 색의 기본적인 스펙트럼으로서의 오방색은 그 방향성과 계절, 맛과 물질의 성질을 포함하는 우주의 스펙트럼이라고 해야 옳다. 이보다 더 풍부한 의미를 내포하는 색의 정의가 있을까.

• Art : 예나 지금이나 화가에게 색채에 대한 물음은 결국 그 시작과 끝이 빛의 세계로 귀결된다. 무지갯빛의 스펙트럼은 결과는 비물질이지만, 실상 회절격자의 물질이 매개가 된 것이다. 김수자가 보여 준 물질과 비물질이라는 이중구조에의 관심에서 본다면 당연한 귀결이라고 할 수 있다. 그렇다. 기본적으로 바로 이 오방색(빛에 내재하는)과 십자구조인 회절격자 필름의 만남이 내가

• Kim : 사용하는 무지개 스펙트럼의 핵심이다. 이 필름은 1cm에 거의 수천 개의 수직수평 스크래치로 긁혀져 특수 제작된 것이다. 거의 나노스케일이어서 눈에 감지되지 않지만, 그 자체로 하나의 투명한 천이다. 나의 작업 그 자체라고 해도 과언이 아니다. 이 필름이 유리창에 부착되어 외부의 빛을 통과할 때 유리창 면과 하나가 된 필름 표면은 프리즘처럼 빛을 굴절시킨다. 결국 유리창은 하나의 빛의 타블로인 셈이다. 날씨 변화에 따라 빛을 호흡하고 변주하면서 벽과 바닥, 또는 천장과 사람의 신체에 빛의 페인팅을 실현하는 것이다. 이때 바닥에 설치된 거울은 또 한번의 반사굴절로 내부 공간을 무지갯빛으로 물들인다. 이 필름이 부착된 표면을 처음 사용할 때는 투명하고 아름다운 구조의 궁전 건축물 자체를 아무런 오브제도 설치하지 않고 하나의 ‘보따리로 싼다’는 개념이었다. 여기에서 바닥의 거울도 보따리 천에 해당된다. 허의 공간을 건축 표면까지 밀어낸 것, 즉 공(vide)의 공간과 나의 숨소리(삶과 죽음의 경계로서의)가 바로 보따리의 구조물이 됐던 것이다. 관람객들은 기존 보따리의 상징적인 인물인 헌옷 대신 살아 있는 퍼포머로 그 안에 싸여지는 것이다. 또 바닥의 거울설치를 통해 그 건축물마저도 이중성을 갖게 되며 하나의 완전성인 구(球)를 지향하는 것이다.

• Art : 반사의 매개체인 거울은 실제와 가상이 혼재하는 확장된 공간을 만들어 내고 있다. 투과성을 띠는 빛과 함께 거울을 자주 사용하는 이유는?

• Kim : 거울을 처음 사용한 것은 하랄트 제만이 감독을 맡았던 1999년 제48회 베니스비엔날레의 본전시 아페르투토(d’Aperttuto)에서였다. 그때의 거울은 코소보 난민에게 헌정한 〈아페르투토, 혹은 보따리트럭(d’Aperttuto, or Bottari Truck in Exile)〉(1999)을 위한 하나의 가상의 길을 여는 작업이자 동시에 아르세날레의 전체 공간을 거울로 싸서 보여 주는 보따리 작업이었다. 거울의 운용은 그때그때 사이트가 요구하는 질문에 응답하며 새로운 개념을 만들어 왔다. 돌이켜 보면, 젊은 시절로 거슬러 올라간다. 내가 1979년에 지금은 없어진 그로리치화랑에서 동료 이윤동 작가와 〈호흡전〉이라는 2인전을 열었다. 그때 창호지를 제거한 한국 가옥의 투명한 격자구조의 문짝을 들고 서서 홍익대 뒷쪽 와우산을 배경으로 일련의 퍼포먼스 사진(흥미롭게도 그때 입었던 스커트가 무지개 색의 사선으로 된 줄무늬 스커트였다)을 흑백 네거티브로 프린트한 투명필름을 빨랫줄에 걸어 한 공간에 설치했다. 또 검은 카펫이 깔려 있던 갤러리 바닥에는 지름 10~15cm 정도의 두 개의 길고 가는 나무둥지를 거의 40~50cm 간격으로 잘라 조금씩 어긋나게 드로잉을 하고, 그 어긋난 나이테 사이에 30cm 정방형의 투명 플렉시글라스를 끼워 넣었던 설치작업이 있었다. 지금 생각하면 그것이 바늘땀이었던 것 같다. 수직수평의 개념도 함축되어 있었고. 내가 회화의 평면성을 질문하던 그때부터 투명성에 관심을 갖게 된 것 같다. 필름의 투명성이나 투과성, 나 자신과 세상을 비추는 거울의 상징적 투명성과 대상성에 관심을 가지고 있었던 것이다. 최근에는 푸아티에의 거울 작업처럼 있는 그대로의 특정 공간의 바닥에 거울을 설치해 공간의 구조를 거울이라는 경계를 통해 재해석하기도 하고, 관객을 의도되지 않은 자율적인 퍼포머로 바라보기도 한다. 또한 10폭 거울 병풍을 새로운 회화 형식으로 제시하기도 했다. 거울은 아직도 나의 조형적 질문의 대상이다. 앞으로도 새로운 개념이 발견될 것만 같은 거울을 기회 있을 때마다 지속적으로 실험할 계획이다.

• Art : ‘경계 넘기’ ‘가로지르기’는 1990년대 광주비엔날레의 ‘경계를 넘어서’ 같은 주제나, 1993년 베니스비엔날레에서 보니토 올리버가 내세웠던 ‘유목성’ 같은 주제를 떠올린다.김수자의 〈보따리〉가 이 시기에 태동된 것은 참으로 절묘하다. 이 시기의 경계나 노마드는 글로벌리제이션으로 쏠려 있다. 동서 냉전 이데올로기의 해체 이후 복합문화주의의 도래, 비서구권 미술의 약진 등 여러 환경 변화와도 밀접한 관계를 맺고 있다.

• Kim : 보따리가 1992년에 탄생했다고 할 때, 노마디즘이나 글로벌리즘의 이슈가 미술과 사회에 거의 동시에 등장했다는 것은 매우 흥미롭다. 단지 내 작업에서의 유목적 특성은 지극히 개인적인 가족사에 기인하며, 그 당시 글로벌리즘은 생각조차 하지 않았다. 그리고 나는 어떤 ‘이즘(ism)’ 등의 프레임워크에는 현재까지도 별 관심이 없다. 보따리는 한순간 직관적으로 발견된 것이지만, 하나의 전체(totality)로서 그 안에 논리적 형식적 내용과 삶의 본질적인 철학과 정서가 내포되어 있기 때문에 지속성을 가지고 진화할 수 있었다고 생각한다. 다만 보는 이의 관점이 낭만적일 때 작업도 더 낭만적으로 보일 것이고, 그것이 더 이상 낭만적일 수 없는 시점에서의 감상은 보다 리얼해 보일 것이다.

• Art : 돌이켜보면, 1992년 〈보따리〉가 나오면서 김수자의 작가적 행보가 급속하게 분주해졌다. ‘물꼬가 터졌다’는 말은 이럴 때 사용해야 하리라. 1995년 베니스비엔날레 특별전 〈호랑이 꼬리〉, 1995년 광주비엔날레, 1996년 도쿄국립근대미술관의 한일교류전 〈1990년대 한국미술 이야기〉 등에서 ‘보따리의 변주’가 이어졌다. 보따리야말로 천변만화의 가변성을 지닌 입체 구조다. 묶기/풀기, 닫음/열림, 구축/해체, 수직성/수평성, 3차원/2차원, 긴장/이완, 수축/팽창, 채움/비움, 정지/이동 등의 조형 체계와 사유의 임의성을 지니고 있다. 이불보를 바닥에 가지런히 깔거나, 테이블보로 설치하거나, 빨랫줄에 널듯이 걸거나…. 〈보따리〉는 이 다양한 얼굴이 무엇보다 매력이다. 1997년에 〈떠도는 도시들-보따리 트럭 2727km〉를 제작하고, 그 이후 1999년부터 〈바늘 여인〉〈빨래하는 여인〉 시리즈가 이어졌다. 〈바늘 여인〉은 서영희가 지적했듯이 “자신이 바늘(수직축)이 되어 세계의 도시와 인파의 층(수평축)을 거듭 관통하며 시공간을 넘어 기억과 체험을 하나로 연결한 작업이다.” 각 대륙의 8개 도시를 방문하면서 〈바늘 여인〉 시리즈를 이어 갔다. 긴 머리를 동여맨 김수자의 뒷모습이 등장한다. 이 뒷모습은 천상 바늘로 보인다. 1999년 김수자는 뉴욕으로 삶의 무대를 옮겼다. 작품도 작가도 이동, 이주가 본격화되었다.

• Kim : 때때로 글로벌리즘의 이슈로 읽히기도 했던 〈바늘 여인(1999∼2001)의 첫 번째 시리즈는 마침 9.11테러가 일어난 바로 그날도 뉴욕 MoMA PS1 개인전에서 전시 중이었다. 그 이후 이라크전쟁 발발과 함께 전 세계가 불신과 증오와 혼란에 빠지고 이슬람권과 기독교권과의 대립이 심화된 상황은 나의 작업에도 영향을 미쳤다. 그래서 시작한 첫 작업이 지금은 사라진 뉴욕의 전설적인 갤러리 더프로젝트(The Project)에서 처음 선보였던 〈Mandala: Zone of Zero〉(2004)였다. 이 작품에는 이라크전쟁에 대한 비판적인 시각이 암묵적으로 깔려 있고, 동시에 세계의 평화와 화합을 암시하는 작업으로 부시(Bush)정책의 폭력성에 대한 발언을 담았다. 키치한 미국의 겜블링 오브제 상점에서 착상한 주크박스 스피커 3개에 티벳과 그레고리언, 그리고 애초엔 이슬람의 성가들이 각각 푸른 벽의 공간에 섞여 다소 혼란스러운 불협화음이 나도록 병치시킨 설치였다. 하지만 실상 이 불협한 세계의 종교와 이념을 모아 들어보면, 매우 공평하고 조화롭다고 생각하게 되지 않는가. 거의 베이스와 바리톤, 그리고 테너의 성악적 체계가 공존하며 나름의 음색으로 대화하듯이 조화로운 코러스를 이룬다. 이번 〈트라베르세/김수자〉에서도 싱글 주크박스에 3개의 성가가 혼합되어 들리도록 제작한 싱글채널 에디션을 콩포르모데른(Confort Moderne) 아트센터에 선보였다. 현재 로마의 21세기미술관 MAXXI에서도 다른 에디션이 선보이고 있고, 시애틀아시아미술관(Seattle Asian Art Museum)에서도 곧 초기 에디션이 동시 다발적으로 선보이게 된다. 이제야 이 작업이 제도권에서 폭넓게 받아들여지고 있다고 생각한다.

글로벌 위기, 어떻게 대응하는가

• Art : T. J. 디모스 같은 이론가는 1980, 90년대의 진행되었던 글로벌리제이션 속의 현대미술의 패러다임은 대단히 로맨틱한 ‘노마디즘’이었다고 간주하는 한편, 2000년대에 와서는 글로벌리제이션에 의해 일어났던 다양한 갈등을 되묻는 물음으로 패러다임이 변했다고 주장한다. 그는 9.11이후의 상황을 ‘글로벌 위기(Crisis Globalization)’이라 부르고, 그것이 내포하는 여러 모순과 아티스트들의 실천 관계를 묻는다. 그것은 오늘의 세계 상황에 대한 미술의 대응이라 요약할 수 있다. 국경을 뛰어넘는 자본주의 경제의 끊임없는 유동, 정보기술의 발전으로 태어난 글로벌 사회는 냉전 종식과 함께 세계 질서의 새로운 유토피아를 꿈꾸었지만, 그 꿈은 결과적으로 무너지고 있다. 이 와중에 진행되었던 경제 불균형의 확대, 난민의 증가, 새로운 정치적 대립은 서구중심주의에서 벗어나 글로벌 아트를 지향해 왔던 아티스트와 큐레이터들의 활동에도 큰 영향을 미쳤다. 작금은 글로벌한 규모로 이동하는 삶의 양태 그 자체, 이를테면 망명, 디아스포라, 난민에 개입해 상상력을 갖춘 비판적 도큐멘터리로서의 아트가 전면에 나왔다. 2017년의 카셀도쿠멘타(여기에 김수자의 〈보따리〉가 출품되었다), 2018년 광주와 부산의 비엔날레에서도 크게 보면, ‘글로벌 위기’가 주제였다. 여기서, 좀 거칠게 묻는다. ‘트라베르세’ 혹은 김수자의 작품은 오늘의 세계 상황에 어떻게 대응하는가.

• Kim : T. J. 디모스의 해석에 공감한다. 2005년 베니스비엔날레 본전시 프로젝트를 위해 〈바늘 여인〉의 두 번째 시리즈를 제작할 때, 나는 첫 번째 시리즈(1999~2001)와 달리 세계의 중심적 대도시가 아니라 경제적 종교적 정치적 문화적 충돌이 발생하는 각 대륙의 문제의 도시와 후기식민주의 문제를 안고 있던 도시를 찾아 나섰다. 그럴 필요를 강력하게 느꼈다. 첫 번째 퍼포먼스를 통해 세계가 무엇으로 고통받고 있는지 내 눈으로 확인했다면, 9.11 이후에 폭력과 대립이 만연한 전 세계의 이중삼중의 충돌현상, 그 혼란의 파고를 목격했기 때문이었다. 이렇듯 나는 현 시대에 살며 한 개인사에서 출발해 확장된 인간의 조건들에 천착해 왔다. 세계에 던지는 나의 존재론적 질문들, 혹은 정치사회적 인류학적 질문들은 언제나 비폭력과 평화, 정의와 진실, 사랑과 화해, 즉 휴머니즘과 유토피아 정신에 뿌리를 두고 있다고 말할 수 있다.

• Art : 앞으로 작품 활동 계획은?

• Kim : 뉴욕 스튜디오의 짐도 한국으로 돌아오고 있다. 새로운 스튜디오도 마련해야 하는데 뜻대로 할 수 있을지 아직은 모든 것이 불확실하다. 늘 불확정적인 삶을 살아서인지 스튜디오가 없어도 걱정되지 않는다. 현재도 뉴욕에서 일하는 어시스턴트가 있고 오랫동안 일해 온 협업자들이 있다. 파리는 파리대로 일을 도와주는 어시스턴트가 있어 모든 프랑스 프로젝트를 현지의 협업자들과 함께 일하고 있다. 한국에서도 협업자를 찾고 있다. 한국을 기반으로 멀리 여행하지 않아도 할 수 있는, 그동안 관심을 가졌던 아시아 지역을 중심으로 한 프로젝트를 펼치고 싶다. 사실 그동안 글로벌하게 협업자들과 일해서 어디를 가더라도 더 이상 거주지가 문제시되지는 않는다. 앞으로 한국 관객들과 더 자주 만나고 참여하며, 작업 외에 한국 미술계의 발전을 위해 내가 할 수 있는 역할을 조금이라도 할 수 있으면 좋겠다. 그간 잘 뒤쫓아 가지 못했던 한국미술도 좀 속속들이 보고 싶다. 늘 낯설고 쉽지 않지만 한국에 조금씩 적응해 봐야 할 것 같다.

• For more than 25 years, South Korean artist Kimsooja has focused her practice on a specific element in her country’s visual culture: the bottari, a colourful bundle of cloth used to wrap and transport items by hand. It is a traditional and timeless component of life in Korea, where bottari fabrics are often recycled from old silk bedcovers, a repurposing that inverts domestic and public spheres, conventional gender roles and power structures. It is in this context that Kimsooja began using this material in her work: ‘I’ve always started from my own reality and my own culture,’ she says. ‘It’s not that I like them, necessarily. I use them because it’s my reality.’

• Kimsooja (who goes by a single-word name, in defiance of cultural conventions) has spent the better part of the past two decades peripatetically, based between New York, Paris and Seoul, and realising projects around the world. Her meditative works explore the self, the other, and the narratives woven through life’s journeys. ‘The whole world I was viewing has been, in a way, wrapping and unwrapping the bottari,’ she reflects. Across sculpture, installation, performance and video, the bottari has served as a visual metaphor for the artist’s own decentred existence and a longer history of human transience, migration and now displacement in a globalised society.

• This year, the 62-year-old artist has translated the handheld bottari to an urban scale, wrapping the French city of Poitiers in a bundle of public art installations that activate its medieval architecture and foreground its rich history. Traversées is a sprawling contemporary art event in this old Roman town southwest of Paris, where Kimsooja inaugurates a new ten- year cultural and urban heritage initiative. More than a dozen works by the artist transform the city’s historic sites into sensorial experiences.

• ‘We wanted to put the city in motion, starting from its iconic sites of memory while looking to the future, which Kimsooja understood perfectly,’ explains the event’s co-artistic director Emmanuelle de Montgazon. ‘This constellation of works resonates together and allows visitors to chart their own course.’

• As the birthplace of Michel Foucault, Poitiers is an apt locale for an in- depth presentation of Kimsooja’s work. The influential 20th-century philosopher’s premise of heterotopia – a socio-cultural space of otherness theorised as a self-contained ‘world within a world’ that exists in parallel to our lived experience – seems a fitting description of Kimsooja’s bottari. The organisers of Traversées were drawn to the duality conveyed by Kimsooja’s works: ‘They exist only in relation to the places they take over, but they come with a very strong introspective dimension, says de Montgazon. ‘They belong as much to their own history as to the history of the places and people to which they are addressed.’

• Kimsooja was originally drawn to bottari in 1992, during an artist residency in New York at PS1 Contemporary Art Center. She adopted it as a colourful, readymade, three-dimensional canvas and alternative platform for art-making that she quickly expanded in multiple directions. ‘I also started working in video, considering the video frame as a wrapping method – wrapping the world or wrapping nature – rather than image- making,’ she recalls. A representative series of her video performance works, collectively titled A Needle Woman (1999-2001), depicts the artist standing motionless in the midst of busy pedestrian thoroughfares around the world, with her back to the camera. In these simple yet compelling works, her body acts as a needle, the unceasing flow of passers-by serving to wrap her stationary form. For Kimsooja, video offers ‘an immaterial way of wrapping the reality of the world’.

• In 2006, Kimsooja received a commission from the Museo Nacional de Reina Sofía in Madrid in which she introduced a different approach to wrapping reality: a site-specific installation at the city’s iron-and-glass Crystal Palace, built in 1887. Titled To Breathe: A Mirror Woman (2006), this large-scale architectural intervention covered the building’s glass exterior with a translucent film that diffracts white light into a spectrum of colours, swathing the interior space in an ethereal prismatic environment. A floor-covering of mirrors multiplied the refractions, completely enveloping the audience in her luminous bottari.

• Similar bottaris of light and sound were subsequently unveiled at the 55th in 2013 (where Kimsooja represented her country at the Korean Pavilion) and earlier this year at the . In Yorkshire, Kimsooja transformed the art centre’s 18th-century chapel into a vertiginous space of reflection, both literally and metaphorically, softening the solid interior surfaces of its historic masonry, to convey a lightness that contrasted with its rigid exterior. In Poitiers, she unveils her first mirror installations to be exhibited in France, including one that reveals the stunning vaulted ceiling of the Maubergeon tower in the medieval Palais des Ducs d’Aquitaine.

• Similar bottaris of light and sound were subsequently unveiled at the 55th in 2013 (where Kimsooja represented her country at the Korean Pavilion) and earlier this year at the . In Yorkshire, Kimsooja transformed the art centre’s 18th-century chapel into a vertiginous space of reflection, both literally and metaphorically, softening the solid interior surfaces of its historic masonry, to convey a lightness that contrasted with its rigid exterior. In Poitiers, she unveils her first mirror installations to be exhibited in France, including one that reveals the stunning vaulted ceiling of the Maubergeon tower in the medieval Palais des Ducs d’Aquitaine.

• For Traversées, Kimsooja approaches the city of Poitiers as a tapestry, its medieval streets and historic sites forming paths that intersect, converge and separate as visitors trace their own journeys while traversing its contours. Not only are her works installed throughout the city, but she has invited an array of other creators – among them composer Myriam Boucher, choreographer Min Tanaka, and artists , Tadashi Kawamata and Rirkrit Tiravanija – to contribute to the project, incorporating their own threads to the warp and weft of Kimsooja’s cultural fabric. §

• During her first visit to the Musée Sainte-Croix of Poitiers, Kimsooja stopped at length in front of Francois Nautré’s painting, Le siège de Poitiers par l’amiral Gaspard de Coligny en 1569 [The Siege of Poitiers by Admiral Gaspard de Coligny in 1569] (1619), a true pictorial account and faithful portrait of the city. She was moved by the representation of the besieged city, by the precision of the narrative, and was overwhelmed by this seeming detail: how the inhabitants sought to survive and protect themselves in this context of war. She was particularly drawn to the large swaths of white cloth protecting the inhabitants’ movements from the enemies on the lookout, and referencing the work of the drapers and weavers in the region.

• Her visits were closely tied to the history of the city, a history that is inseparable from its cultural and social fabric, which makes it so rich.

• “It is only one step from memory to encounter,” wrote Marc Augé2. Thus Kimsooja focuses on personal stories that are often forgotten by History. From the splendor of Eleanor of Aquitaine to the famous passage of Joan of Arc, Kimsooja preferred the tutelary figure of Saint Radegund (520-587), Queen of the Francs, “divorced” from a tyrant, who devoted the rest of her life as nun to the disenfranchised. In the church of Sainte-Radegonde, Kimsooja was moved by the sobriety of her tomb and the many votive plaques, some of which are still recent, that cover the dark crypt and the choir. She was also attached to the figure of Jean-Richard Bloch, a politically-engaged poet and writer, friend of Louis Aragon and André Malraux, “exiled in his own city,” who opened his house in La Mérigotte—which has become the Villa Bloch 2019 artists’ residency—to writers, political refugees, poets and musicians.

• Kimsooja was born in Korea, a country where Christianity is at its most influential in Asia, while co-existing with Confucianism, Shamanism, Taoism, and Buddhism. By choosing a nomadic life, she carries with her the origins of her culture, whose belief in the “Spirit heart” is founded on the pursuit of harmony. This cultural identity mixed with family history leads to the encounter with the Other, the necessary mirror to one’s own existence.

• In the majestic Palace of the dukes of Aquitaine, the center of spirituality and contemporary culture, Kimsooja conceived a crossing of the City based on the very principles of co-existence and harmony that have inspired all of her work for over thirty years.

• “Travelling reaffirms that the world is not a flawless process.” These are the words of philosopher Jean-Godeffroy Bidima, whose works on African identity are built around this notion, which he deems to be resolutely plural. His definition is a promise that looks to the future and to growth, opening the fertile ground between identity, travel and memory to a constellation of new possibilities. With the issue of migration occupying a central place in society, and the West still struggling to break free from postcolonial discourse, the Traversées project questions the factors behind the acts of travel, movement and uprooting that fuel the work of Kimsooja and her fellow artists who, through personal experiences and without bias, are able to capture and portray the perceptible and invisible flows of an increasingly unsettled contemporary world. The common thread between voluntary nomadism and forced migration is probably found in the act of being uprooted.

• To symbolically hand over the keys of Poitiers to Kimsooja is to accept that the city’s memories will be transformed into a space in which to imagine the future. But it is also to offer the artist the opportunity to re-frame her work; to imbed it in a new time and space, that of a city steeped in history; to imperceptibly sketch out new lines, influenced by the ideas of Michel Foucault, by the memory of the former Palais de Justice, by the spirituality of places of worship, and by the generosity of the Villa Bloch. These “traversées” will open our eyes to new paths and will write a new chapter in this rich story, one that will not only be recounted but lived and shared, turning local residents and visitors alike into wanderers, following the paths left by the artists, routes that fork and multiply into a disorienting infinity. The catalogue accompanying Traversées / Kimsooja aims to guide the viewer through this journey, and to suggest through certain key works, including Bottari, A Needle Woman, and To Breathe, pathways that connect Kimsooja’s work to that of other invited artists, and invent a new geography.

• Jung Marie’s Korea meets Subodh Gupta’s India. Rirkrit Tiravanija nests a tea house inside a scaffolding of bamboo from Thailand, with a ceremony led by Mai Ueda. New Yorker Stephen Vitiello reveals the buried sounds of the city of Poitiers, while Sammy Baloji slows down the monotonous chants of a children’s choir inside the Chapel of the Augustins, drawing out the role played by the Church in the colonial enterprise.

• A “traversée” is an experience of otherness and hospitality and the paths of Traversées / Kimsooja are outlined, everyone can create their own journey. Similarly, the artists accompanying Kimsooja “advance life, activate it, intensify it, renew it”.3 The city, transformed by these unique works, as the shared meals of Thomas Ferrand or Subodh Gupta, progressively reveals its various historical, social, collective and individual dimensions. In this kaleidoscope, every movement, every action, every breath, every glance becomes another possibility for physical and metaphysical discovery, and constitutes a shared memory, woven together by the gestures, as the danced portraits or choreographies of Lenio Kaklea, that comprise – just like Kimsooja’s Thread Routes – this “slow and silent journey”.

• Space is transfigured in Kimsooja’s work, becoming a sensory experience. She hollows out the architecture of the different sites, letting new sensations in, disturbing their stability. She instils a void in the heart of the stone, that interstitial space essential to the dialectics of Yin and Yang, to the rhythm of breathing, the beat at the core of life.

• Inspired by Michel Foucault and his definition of heterotopia, which “has the power to juxtapose in a single real space, several spaces, several locations which are in themselves incompatible,”4 Kimsooja disperses space using light diffraction and mirrors, as seen in her work To Breathe. Her spaces are dematerialised; they shake the weight of history to become – like the artist herself – nomadic, as the nests of Tadashi Kawamata. They are spaces without space and thus, in Foucault’s eyes, produce the shift required to make the coexistence of utopias possible. Kimsooja metonymically inverses the world order, her aesthetic response to the turbulence and violence she perceives. Our sense of horizontality is disturbed as it becomes warped by the effect of the mirrors into abyss-like depths, while the space takes on an atmospheric quality. “I’d like to make works that are like water and air, that cannot be owned but can be shared by everyone,” explains Kimsooja. Like the miniature world contained in the “bottari”, the lines between Kimsooja’s work and the space that it inhabits become blurred. Fabrics, films and mirrors – the artist’s vocabulary – take on the appearance of bodies or membranes, skins that sense, react and reveal, that filter and diffract the commotion of urban life, the ashes of light, energy and electric short circuits that punctuate the outside world, transforming them into a constantly self-renewing visual and pictorial experience.

• The works by the guest artists infiltrate city life, offering shared vessels for beleaguered bodies, worn down by the inconsistencies of the world, gradually breathing in unison or moulding, as is the case with the clay spheres of Archive of Mind. An emotion is released from these works; the realisation that we can now conceive, to borrow the words of Jean-Paul Sartre on the eve of the Second World War, “what an emotion is. It is a transformation of the world.”

• POITIERS, France — In front of many historic places in the western French city of Poitiers — including the Palace of the Dukes of Aquitaine, the former home of the medieval celebrity Eleanor, the queen consort of France and then of England — stand big boards announcing a three-month citywide contemporary art festival that runs through Jan. 19.
  Surprisingly, the boards are decorated with obangsaek, or the Korean traditional spectrum of five cardinal colors, which represent the four directions and the center. Moreover, the event’s title is “Traversées / Kimsooja,” including the name of the Korean contemporary artist of international renown.
  There is also a shipping container covered with obangsaek in the square of the city’s landmark Poitiers Cathedral. It is Kimsooja’s new work titled “Bottari 1999-2019,” which carries her personal belongings that she amassed in her New York apartment over the last 20 years. Now that she is leaving the apartment, the container is a symbol of her migratory, nomadic and in-between state. Bottari means traditional Korean cloth bundles used to carry belongings.
  The inaugural edition of Poitiers’ new art festival “Traversées,” which translates to traverses or acts of crossing, has not taken the typical form of the international art biennials that have saturated the world. Instead, it let one artist interact with and change the city by installing her works in the new contexts of the city’s old buildings and streets.
  The artist was also encouraged to invite other artists to join the citywide exhibition. Sixteen artists from all around the world, including big names like Indian artist Subodh Gupta, Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata and Congolese artist Sammy Baloji, have joined.

• “It was the idea of the festival’s co-curator Emma Lavigne,” Kimsooja told the Korea JoongAng Daily at the opening on Oct. 12. Lavigne, the new president of the prestigious Palais de Tokyo museum in Paris, and Emmanuelle de Montgazon, an art historian born in Poitiers, are co-curators of the art event.
  “This might be the most inspiring, challenging and ambitious project I’ve done so far, mainly focusing on site-specificity responding to the notion of Traversées, to which I’ve been devoted for so many years,” Kimsooja said.
  Indeed, throughout her oeuvre, the 62-year-old artist has explored borders and crossed borders, sometimes with performances and films that symbolically allude to migration in the real world and sometimes with abstract installations that visualize moving through the borders between cosmic dualities such as yin and yang and material and non-material.
  The very work that propelled the artist to international fame in 1997 was also about migration. For the performance and video work “Cities on the Move: 2,727 kilometers Bottari Truck,” she traveled throughout Korea for 11 days on top of a truck loaded with bottari. Its 2007 version, commissioned by a French museum, was set in Paris and is now projected on a wall of Saint-Louis Chapel in Poitiers, with the truck used for the performance parked inside the chapel near its gracefully-arched and painted altar.
  According to Lavigne and de Montgazon, the colorful bottari on the truck “reveals the tension between perpetual displacement and a desire for familiarity” and the performance is “an allegory of migration but also an appeal for empathy and peaceful co-existence.” Such elements of the work gain more resonance in the new context of the old Catholic chapel, which could have been either a place of religious exclusivism or a refuge for alienated people.
  “To symbolically hand over the keys of Poitiers to an artist is to accept that the city’s memories will be transformed into a space in which to imagine the future,” Lavigne and de Montgazon said in a joint statement. “Poitiers is a city famous for its rich heritage and its university,” said Alain Claeys, the mayor of the city. “Our wish is to build a relationship between heritage and contemporary art, which will allow heritage to have a new life. In particular, with artist Kimsooja’s works, we can talk about the very important topic of our time : migration"

• Kimsooja has dealt with crossing geopolitical and cultural borders, as well as abstract borders between dualities such as light and darkness, with the motifs of sewing, weaving and bottari. In sewing, a needle and thread penetrate the borders of fabric. And bottari, which is two-dimensional when spread out and three-dimensional when bundled up, makes a very flexible boundary between inside and outside.
  The artist has used the motifs sometimes in literal forms and sometimes in abstract and symbolic forms. The latter is seen in the “To Breathe” series now installed at the cloister of Chapelle des Augustins and the catacomb of Sainte-Radegonde Church in Poitiers.
  Their windows have been wrapped by Kimsooja with translucent diffraction film sheets, so that sunlight coming through them and falling on the walls and floors make planes of iridescent light that constantly change, just like “breathing obangsaek bottari,” the artist said.
  “The works lead the viewers to stay for a long time and meditate, while perceiving the changes of the spaces over time,” Lavigne said.
  Not only Kimsooja but also some of the artists invited to “Traversées” have transformed the historic spaces of Poitiers into those of new perception and imagination with relatively simple physical interventions. When Korean artist Jung Marie sang a jeongga, or an elegant song enjoyed by the aristocracy in the Joseon era (1392-1910), a cappella at Sainte-Radegonde Church, her clear voice resounded even better under the church’s high vaults, sending the audience to an ethereal and spiritual space in between the East and the West. Meanwhile, Gupta’s installation and performance art piece “Cooking the World” attracted many people at the opening of the festival. In a house-shaped installation that consists of used Indian pots and pans hanging from the ceiling, the artist himself cooked popular street foods from several Indian cities and served them to the viewers.
  “Inspired by the book ‘Cooking the World’ by Charles Malamoud about how food is essential in Indian ceremonies and rituals, I thought I can do something with food, as I love to cook myself and have created artworks with utensils for more than 20 years,” the Indian artist said. One of the highlights of the exhibits is Kimsooja’s performance installation “Archive of Mind” at the Palace of the Dukes of Aquitaine. There’s a giant, oval-shaped wooden table. Visitors are encouraged to take lumps of clay in four shades, roll them into spheres and then place them on the table to dry. The table with finished balls of clay resembles the landscape of a desolate alien planet, giving a cosmic feel.

• When Kimsooja introduced the work in Seoul in 2016, she said the forms of the spheres would reflect the symmetrical forces of the palms of the participants and their minds. The clay balls would have edges, because of the impossibility to make a perfect sphere and because of gravity’s effect when they are dried on the table.
  The dried clay balls make sounds when they are rolled and the sounds represent their geometric forms — the forms caused by the dual forces of the participants’ palms, their minds and gravity.
  “Poitiers, which was important in international politics in medieval times but then was dormant for quite a time, is now opening itself up to the world again” Kimsooja told the Korea JoongAng Daily. “Responding to the city’s wish, I have weaved the city with other parts of the world through my works based in the notions of crossing borders and works by other artists from all around the world.”

• The world is torn by conflict and yet each tear, each micro-struggle and clash is toward its own version of unity. All conflict is a nostalgia for and trajectory toward a totalizing scheme. Of course, there are different structures of totalization, some that suppress difference and others that support a democratic ethos. In the broadest sense, the idea of totalization is captured by Martin Heideggerís term ìBeing-in,î for which the simplest definition is offered by Peter Sloterdijk as ìsomething with something in something.î The social example of Being-in is that we are each a something, and so we are somethings together within the something that is society. Society: from the Latin socius, a comrade. And so society is the being-together of comrades. Civitas: from the Greek word for city and which leads to the word ìcitizen,î or those comrades who live together in organized space. Polis: from the proto-Indo-European pele, an enclosed space, so that the polis is an enclosed space of citizens in which to Be-in is to live under the organization of social codes, of codes among comrades, though the codes, as all the annals of human time tell us, are always in a state of both schematized and anarchic disruption carried forward into negotiation and revision.

• Socius. Civitas. Polis. In the art of Kimsooja, there are two assumptions that underlie the symbolic social intention running throughout her career of making. One of these assumptions is journalistic in its basis, accepting the daily and historical record of events. This assumption is that humans are (by the evidence of actions always and everywhere repeated) violent, destructive, and intolerant. The other assumption, in contrast with the first, is that we seek wholeness and rely on healing and care in its many forms to address the iniquities of human destructiveness. Indeed, these counterpoised signatures of human conduct are the needle dipping in and out of the cloth of being human and the belief structures underlying our nature, both theological and philosophical. The biosphere, the life codes, the sociality, the deistic principles, the ethical apparatusesówhether it is a war in our blood, a crisis of political sovereignty or a crisis of religious faithóthese constructs torn asunder or joined together in unified consensus toward the co-existence of difference are within the praxis of Being-in.

• Society within itself has, from the time of Aristotle, asked the questions of what is the good life and how can we live together? This is the subject of ethics. But in the short space of this essay, I would like to specify this thinking about ethics as a questioning of how we should act toward one another in order to live in consensual understanding and agreement, and by doing so mediate violence toward the social whole. Can we, therefore, understand Being-in in the limited sense of its social format of being-together? Can we understand totalization not as universalism and absolutism, but as a space of closeness in which otherness and improvisation act as fulcrums in a continual rising and falling of chaos and order? And can we then define this being-together as the responsibility of the socius to overcome its violence toward wholeness, its lacerating shards that are the fragmentation of the enclosed space of society and the undoing of unifying social forms?

• In this case, unification does not void the presence of violence, but envisions a flexibility of social codes under the contingencies of circumstance so that recodings can take place through consensual agreement, by deliberation and plebiscite. Ethical wholeness is understood as the agreement among selves alert to their equality, for the ethical self is the self that bears responsibility for its actions toward other selves, and therefore ethics is a questioning of actions and a listening to the answers of others toward resolution. This is a form of critique in which the social self is formed in the crucible of the exchange of questions and answers about how to act on and in this being with others, this being-together, which is always a mapping of the social space, the space of what could be called ethical intimacy. Ethics in this sense is a form of creative practice that takes into consideration contingency, agency, and the mutuality of deliberation.

• I come to this thinking about ethics in light of the overall project of Kimsoojaís art, as it seems to me that her questions and propositions in the argument of her work are fundamentally presented as what I will call a gestural ethics. Her work over the years and in its various forms offers itself as a symbolic representation of an aspirational being-together. The opacity of individual selves is not so much taken into account as an idealized transparency of recognition of selves who may move through the violent complications of human nature toward a valorized sociality of tolerance. Commonality is a feature of the artistís proposal of what being-together can mean, and to this point, we see a repeated figural gesture in her art, for whenever we see Kimsooja in a video or photograph, her back is to us, she is facing other people, other things, as if to always say, ìHow can I be with you if we are to be together in light of our differences from one another, in light of the possibility of agreement?î As if to insist on a dance of the reciprocity of identities, ìWho am I in you and who are you in me?î

• In fact, a constant in the artistís works is the sense of collective presence, of watching and participating in the dance of selves with selves performing that dance. In this movement of I-with-you, there is an implicit proposal of the similarities and conjunctions among disparate things in environments of work and contemplationóseen, for example, in moving-image works such as A Needle Woman and Thread Routes. These are spaces that feel hermetically concentrated, given to an almost ethnographic scrutiny, narrowed by a gaze that looks to the weighted significance of hands and figures focused by the charged intensity of enclosed space. Kimsoojaís camera may establish its point of view in open air, as we see continually in her films and videos, but there is always a sense of motions framed, cropped, pulled inward. Meditative attention is paid to the study of human movements whose results are linked at once to embodied presence, sociality, material labor, and, at the same time, to the ethereal abstraction of repetition.

• The artistís installations are underwritten by this sense of collective intimacy, this gestural ethics in which space presents itself as the enraptured site of an enlightened stitching of things, one to another. Light itself and the symbolic value of colors imbue this being-together. I think of her Deductive Object (2016), an ovoid welded steel form painted with stripes in the colors of the traditional Korean Obangsaek, colors representing the five cardinal directionsóeast, south, center, west, northóand the five elements as established in Korean culture: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. Touch, sight, breath, weight, durability, timeís duration, the direction of the sun, what the body needs to sustain itself, where it will travel, hearth and toolÖ all speak to the idea of Being-in as a home in the world, the world of life, of what the Greeks called zo?, as Giorgio Agamben notes, zo? as ìthe simple fact of living common to all living beings,î and here also, the Greek bios, the way of living as an individual and in being-together. These dual flows of living, crossing one into the other as streams of unbridled and governed energies, are indicated in the coded colors and the completed geometry of this sculpture, whose title confers its reasoned status as a physical artifice deduced from a totalizing metaphysical proposition. Kimsooja undergirds this symbolism by placing her Deductive Object on a mirrored plinth in an enclosed courtyard so that it sits at a center, an omphalos of the socius that amplifies this Being-in and being-together, above it a sky that brings light from every direction.

• Around this sculpture, which towers at nearly two-and-a-half meters like a heroic obelisk, are the museumís windowed walls that the artist has covered with a special diffraction grating she has often used. It refracts the light into a rainbowís spectrum. It is a pictorial device, as it turns every windowed view into a frame in which details are dissolved into vaguely abstract shapes alive with angles of color. The abstraction activates an optical dematerialization, one thing melting into another, and this too underscores a theme of unified being, returning us from matter to metaphysical belonging. Even the title of the work, To Breathe, intends to dissolve boundaries, suggesting that seeing and breathing are one with the other, a kind of synesthesia, a sensory miscegenation. This trajectory toward fluidity and fusion is a perennial current in the Kimsoojaís work: bodies together in repeated acts of attention, of moving, of making; bodies that float on mirrored surfaces, suspending materiality, that are abstracted and generalized, that are corporeal but are oftentimes inflected by a sound recording variously of the artistís breathing, humming or gurgling that hovers in the air, which she uses recurrently to suggest the shedding of the body, of the liquefaction of inside and outside, the original version of which was titled The Weaving Factory from 2004, and the most recent, Unfolding Sphere, from 2016. Itís as if, in this art, the consecrations of repeated actions and motifs form a ritual of conjoined beingóthis gestural ethics in which the rendering of a ceaselessly various but continuous activity of negotiating the sociality of I-with-you is predicated on the idea of repetition as order, repetition as an emblem of the establishment of norms, of practiced ways of being-together that are open to play, to process and change.

• So it is that the communal performance of Kimsoojaís installation titled Archive of Mind (2016), which is also the name of the exhibition here at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, presents us with a nineteen meter elliptical wood table set out with lumps of clay to be rolled between each guestís hands to form spheres, the table filling with them like a model of a domed city or the map of a constellation dense with newborn planets. Clay, of course, is the material from which we are made in origin myths of the world, that a God-figure shapes, breathing into that clay of the raw human form to ìinspireî itófrom the Latin insp?r?re, meaning literally to fill with breathóto bring the body to life. These clay spheres, then, bear the symbolic inspiration of the hand that makes, shapes, encloses, a marking of self and selves, of recognitions, as recognition itself is a conscious acknowledgment of the other. And here this recognition is an acknowledged mutuality that is premised on the playful pleasure of the communal act, of hands directed toward similar motions with a single material, producing similar sounds as they transform this clay and momentarily themselves, transfigured by this act of the mutual (for the word ìmutualî originates in the Latin m?t?re, to change). Mutuality and mutability are one with the other, just as the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy notes of the I-with-you, of the transformation in being-together: ìI can only recognize myself recognized by the other to the extent that this recognition of the other alters me.î

• It is the transformative act of recognition of self and other, of the reciprocity of the I and you that makes way for social discourse, for dissensus and consensus in the negotiation of how we can be together. This discourse is always mobilized by circumstance, though the frame of ethics is based on a durable plinth of reason reflecting upward to present the possibility of a complementary perspective from the grounds of interdependence. In Archive of Mind, bodies address each other through the motion and task of hands, entering into the sociality of being. Through this act of making, of the manual activity of those sitting in the ellipse of this table, watching each other, listening to each other, and listening together to the amplified recording of balls rolling and Kimsoojaís body gurgling (that audio work, Unfolding Spheres), these closed circles of unifying actions present a normative purpose that instantiates the recognizability of I-with-you, of each with the otherís being-together.

• Still, the project of Kimsoojaís work is not limited to the human self as subject, but proposes that we are things among other things, a broader ethics, an idea of agency that is animistic in its reach. All things are woven in this proposition, as in a web that catches each thing that exists as a generative machine of correlation and, with hope, affiliation that populates the Being-in. This is made manifest in the artistís series of six 16-milimeter films entitled Thread Routes (2010-16). Take, for example, the most recent of these, Thread RoutesñChapter V (2016), whose method, as we also see in the previous works in the series, is to show in a documentary yet poetic style a global range of landscapes and peoples and their practices of weaving. In Thread RoutesñChapter V, we see wicker baskets being made. We see various women working with handlooms, and I am reminded that the loom was the progenitor of modern computation, so that a web of woven yarn is parent to the billions of strands of data on the Internetís World Wide Web, and that the Internet as an active form of ordering, of interwoven streams of electricity and light, is only a microcosm of the still more universal zo? and bios, a marker in a much greater, constellated vastness.

• That is the artistís documentary point, as the images of human actants are intercut with close-ups held like a long breath so that our attention is steadied and concentrates on natural thingsógrasses, currents of water, clouds, floral patterns, even the dense strands of hair on someoneís headóthat suddenly appear in their knitted forms, just as yarn and wicker do. What we are presented with in this film and the others in the series is the motif of similitude, the way one thing is a formal echo of another, and it isnít necessary that every single thing has agency, but that we can see in all things their common parentage in the composition of the world and discern by a leap of ontological inference an originary intelligence. This prelapsarian, ante-methodological, originary ejaculation of active materiality is presented as evidence, as I have said, of all zo?, all life in its primordial and blossoming forms, whether abject or ecstatic, by which the ìthread routeî is the thread of this originary intelligence through all matter, and threading is equivalent with marvel, equivalent with ìsomething with something in something,î and equivalent, therefore, with the woven-ness of Being, as if the world in the thread of all time and before time were shrunk to a miracle of emblematic presence displayed in a glass vitrine, a cosmos in a teacup, all threading as the gesture of the genomic impulse toward supreme order hung like an amulet on Beingís many-bodied and bodiless body.

• These woven likenesses in Kimsoojaís artworks suggest an expansive mise en abyme among materially different things; a mirrored reciprocity of othernesses in constant address that are therefore exemplars of a gestural ethics that invokes the obligation of one thing to another to find a normative frame in which Being-in in its aspect of being-together can give account of an agora of reparative promise. This ethical work, because of its openness, in which all things, human and nonhuman, may participate and are envisioned as participating, rests on anecdotal moments of local histories, geographies, politics, and the most localized gestures of bodies in rooms together, at the same time that it is pan-political and trans-temporal through the artistís regular investment of symbolism in materials, colors, gestures, and forms. Ethical relativism, the moral systems of individual cultures, is simultaneously acknowledged and contravened, imagined within a supreme coefficiency of thing with thing, a breath elongated, a light refracted and spread, in the artistís overarching imagining of Being-in, this task of intimacy, of being-together.

• While a group of people is working diligently around a large oval table, a mysterious sound reverberates through the dark space. The exhibition Archive of Mind (2016) begins with these curious, almost cosmic sounds, along the huge empty table. The accumulation of small, solid balls of clay on the tabletop forms an image that perfectly complements the sound, creating the central work Archive of Mind (2016). The delicate combination of the sound and image coax the viewers to consider a primal time and space that existed before civilization.

Galaxy of Mind

• The sound that continually echoes through the space of Archive of Mind is a mixture of the sound of dried clay balls being rolled across the table in different directions and the sound of the artist gargling water. The recorded sound, which is amplified from underneath the table, travels between 32 speakers, transforming the space into a meditative arena. When the volume is low, the sound of the clay balls is clear and vivid, but when the volume is raised, the sound becomes a storm of thunder and lightning. The cosmic dimension of the work is particularly intriguing, given that the artist Kimsooja described Archive of Mind as a “galaxy of mind.” She continued to say that the “sound of the clay balls rolling over the flat surface represents the horizontal trajectory, while the gurgling sound of water represents the vertical trajectory of traversing one’s diaphragm.” Hence, the work visualizes a psychological geometry that arises from the coexistence and dynamics between these horizontal and vertical trajectories. Moreover, the sound of the round balls rolling across the table provides viewers with an auditory experience of geometric shapes. Thus, through sound, Archive of Mind evinces both the material surface and the surrounding void. Archive of Mind encompasses the sound of Unfolding Sphere along with the performance of the people forming the clay balls, yielding an immersive experience that transcends polarities and dualities, enacting a unity that may be seen as the motivating power behind Kimsooja’s art.

• Although her interest in ceramics can be traced back about ten years, Kimsooja has only recently begun to create works with clay. The clay balls first appeared in 2016, when Kimsooja was invited to participate in Water Event, the solo exhibition of Ono Yoko (b. 1933) at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon. For that exhibition, Kimsooja exhibited a single ball that she had shaped from a handful of wet clay. Rather than transforming clay into utensils or objects, she is primarily interested in the material characteristics of the clay, as well as the dual possibility of emptying and filling. The act of making a ball of clay requires the use of both hands to cover, press, and roll the clay. In order to form a perfect sphere, all points of each hand must be focused and directed towards the center. Each clay sphere, consisting of earth and water, is a microcosm of our planet as a living organism.

• This simple and repetitive process is also related to the concept of Bottari, Kimsooja’s artistic trademark. “Bottari” refers to the practice of bundling goods or possessions in a traditional wrapping cloth for easier transportation. Considering this universal act, Kimsooja said, “Like these forms gradually converging to the center, my mind also converges. Moreover, these acts embody the moment when materiality is transformed into immateriality and ‘void’.” Here, rolling a clay ball is no longer a frivolous act of play. Instead, it becomes a type of ritual in which a mind is formed and shaped by shaving off the sharp corners. Also, the repetitious act of rolling balls of clay between one’s palms can leave people enchanted, like a spell.

Completion of Works and Audience

• At the entrance of Kimsooja’s Archive of Mind, clay is provided for visitors; they may take as much as they like, with the understanding that they will roll it into one or more balls and place them on the table. It is crucial to note that Kimsooja has never incorporated this type of audience participation in any of her previous works. As such, it seems to necessitate some explanation and justification. In the contemporary art world, works involving audience participation are generally well-received, in part because they are almost guaranteed to draw a large audience. At the same time, however, they have been criticized for pandering to popular tastes. Of course, just because an artwork or exhibition generates a positive public response does not necessarily mean that it has pandered to popular tastes, just as works that are not well-received cannot automatically be classified as progressive or experimental. Moving beyond such issues, we should focus on the details of audience participation in this work. In particular, how do the audience’s actions (i.e., entering the exhibition, choosing clay, rolling it into a ball, putting it on the table, leaving the exhibition) connect and contribute to the overall meaning and context of Kimsooja’s existing oeuvre?

• In her works, the audience has always been one with the artist, sharing the artist’s thoughts and point of view. To understand her works, we must examine how the artist-subject is transformed into the audience-subject. In A Needle Woman and A Laundry Woman, for example, the audience is forced to focus their attention on a woman’s back. As such, the audience virtually wears the clothes of the artist, and sees the world from the position of the artist. For her Bottari works, discarded clothes are bundled inside used blankets and sheets of unknown origin; the resulting parcels are then carried to various parts of the world by a searching subject. Thus, the subject is once again conflated with the audience. In Kimsooja’s works, the audience is not a passive recipient of the artist’s ideas or perspectives; instead, the audience is transformed into an active and initiative subject who shares various forms of life that are guided by the artist. In Archive of Mind, the audience takes on an even more active role by clasping and rolling clay, an act that distinctly recalls the packing and wrapping of Bottari parcels. Like the active subject who symbolically becomes the artist’s body and envelopes the world, the audience of this exhibition participates in a kind of ritual by forming balls of clay, thereby helping to complete this work by unfolding their own “Archive of Mind.”

Geometric Experiences

• For people who know Kimsooja primarily through A Needle Woman or her Bottari works, the theme of this exhibition might be a little surprising. Notably, however, the displayed works still feature two fundamental characteristics that have defined her work for over thirty years: a horizontal-vertical structure and a dynamic spatial relationship. In her art, Kimsooja uses geometric thoughts and experiences to unify dualities, thus yielding a new type of space. This psychological geometry tends to emphasize the quality of space, rather than the quantity, often creating new forms by transitioning from one condition to another.

• In A Study on Body (1981), an early work that she made while she was in her twenties, Kimsooja explored geometric shapes by using her own body as an axis, around which her various joints bend both vertically and horizontally. The documentation of her performance demonstrates how bodily movements can enact basic geometric shapes, such as triangles, squares, circles, and semicircles. Indeed, A Study on Body lays the framework for understanding the recurring vertical-horizontal cross structure that has now characterized Kimsooja’s works for more than thirty-five years. In the early 1980s, when there were many regulations limiting international travel for Koreans, Kimsooja went to Japan for the first time, as part of an exchange exhibition. Almost immediately, she noted the difference between the cultures of the two countries. From that point forward, she began emphasizing structural and formal characteristics that are inherent to Korea, such as austerity, incompletion, unique colors, and the principle of the “Three Ultimates” (i.e., Heaven, Earth, and mankind). She began utilizing the dynamism of the cross structure to interpret everything from aspects of daily life to grand concepts of life and death. This is the context from which A Study on Body emerged. Indeed, this structure has remained a consistent element of her subsequent works (e.g., Bottari, A Needle Woman, A Mirror Woman, To Breathe), functioning like an archetype of her practice. Furthermore, this structure provides the primary meaning and connection among the diverse works presented in this exhibition, such as A Study on Body (1981), Geometry of Body (2006-2015), and Archive of Mind (2016).

• One of the main characteristics of contemporary art is the mixture of temporal and spatial attributes. In this sense, Kimsooja’s Geometry of Body can be said to visualize the invisible by spatializing time. This work involves a yoga mat that the artist has used since 2006, such that it is now embedded with traces of her body, forming a perfect self-portrait. The colorless traces left by countless pressings of her hands and feet cause us to imagine gravity and her momentary movements. The yoga mat also extends the concept of the “readyused,” which characterized her earlier works with bottari, blankets, and sheets. Here, however, the object is used to visualize the body and to reveal ephemeral motion and gravity. In a similar vein, One Breath (2004/2016), which originated as part of Kimsooja’s sound performance of The Weaving Factory (2004), is a digital embroidery drawing that reproduces the wavelength of a single breath of Kimsooja. During a breathing performance, a monitor tracks the artist’s inhalations and exhalations; then, one full breath is chosen at random and rendered as digital embroidery. The peaks and valleys of regular respiration are recorded as a graph, followed by a horizontal line that marks the moment of respiratory arrest. The prominent vertical-horizontal structure and depth of the breathing performance represent an extension of the circular loop that she had earlier represented in her sewing works, which she stopped making in 1992.

Deductive Space

• Deductive Object (2016), a sculpture of the artist’s own arms, is Kimsooja’s first work involving life casting. The two arms are facing one another, with the thumb and index finger touching to form the void. At first glance, it looks like a rather straightforward example of life casting sculpture. But upon further consideration, the distinctive position of the thumb and index finger inevitably makes us think of holding a needle. Kimsooja views this connection as another form of weaving, constructing a void within the act. This gesture calls to mind her earlier series Deductive Object (1992), which consisted of wrapped objects. That series was an extension of Kimsooja’s early sewing works, wherein she used the motion of the needle to represent the repeated penetration of the horizontal by the vertical. Similar to Bottari, the act of sewing connects dualities, weaves separate entities to form a new relationship, and proposes an aesthetic of tolerance and embrace. Installed in the museum’s courtyard, the new version of Deductive Object (2016) is Kimsooja’s second outdoor sculpture; the first was A Needle Woman: Galaxy Was A Memory, Earth Is A Souvenir (2014), a work involving nanotechnology, which was installed on the campus of Cornell University in New York. Deductive Object (2016) was inspired by the Brahmanda (black stones sometimes called “cosmic eggs”) an Indian symbol of the birth of the universe. According to Indian tradition, the black surface of the Brahmanda is rubbed until it becomes reflective, like a mirror. Learning about the Brahmanda, Kimsooja recognized various points of connection with her own work, particularly related to the attitude and significance of her Bottari works. These affinities led to the creation of a huge ellipsoid decorated with Obangsaek (five-colored bands – include description in footnote). In Kimsooja’s early Bottari works, the two-dimensional surface (or tableau) of fabric became a three-dimensional sculpture through the simple act of tying. For this exhibition, Deductive Object enacts a new type of transformation, with the geometry of Bottari now visualized as a five-colored ellipsoid. Moreover, this unique transformation is reflected and expanded by the mirrored pedestal that holds the ellipsoid.

• A cosmic egg placed on a mirror, Deductive Object coexists with To Breathe (2016), a site-specific work made with diffraction grating film. For To Breathe, Kimsooja transformed the windows and walls of the museum’s courtyard into a giant Bottari, a technique she had previously employed with A Mirror Woman (2006) at the Crystal Palace in Madrid. In the current work, the walls are covered with the diffraction grating film that radiates an array of colors and sunlight in all directions, filling the space with a brilliant spectrum. Through this site-specific work, the courtyard becomes a welcome respite where the audience can rest and meditate. In addition, the ground is lined with mirrors that reflect everything, highlighting the immateriality and void of the five-colored ellipsoid. To Breathe extends the void of space onto the surfaces, thereby “immaterializing” the duality of Bottari into the language of light. Therefore, the work maximizes the symbolic power of the unity between sculpture and flat surface, between the material and immaterial.

Weaving the World

• The only video work in the exhibition is Thread Routes – Chapter V (2016), the fifth in Kimsooja’s Thread Routes series (2010-) documenting her travels throughout the world. This edition, set in North America, merges cultural anthropology, unique geology, and astounding natural scenery. The artist combines images of a spinning wheel with scenes of basket weaving by the Navajo and Hopi tribes, against the magnificent scenery of Shiprock and Canyon de Chelly in the Southwest United States, along with ancient ruins of the Chaco Culture. The huge mountains and caves, formed over eons of time by water, wind, and soil, move both spatially and temporally until they become connected to overhead wires, long stretches of road, and eventually, the industrial environment of a huge metropolis. The video ends with an aerial view of the massive ramps, freeways, and intersections of Los Angeles. Using an anthropological exploration, the video reveals how the fabric of the world is shaped by acts of weaving, enveloping, and unfolding.

• Although the first chapter of the Thread Routes series was finished in 2010, the series can actually be traced back to 2002. At that time, Kimsooja drew the inspiration for “Thread Routes” from the tradition of weaving lace in Bruges, Belgium, which she examined within the context of various architectural features. Through the series, she has explored other European and Asian traditions of lace weaving, crafts, and embroidery, as well as the spinning wheel of Native American nomads. On one hand, the series may be seen as a type of cultural anthropology, but at the same time, it overwhelms us with lyrical beauty, and thus might be called the poetics of nature and civilization. Although the new video does not include any of Kimsooja’s most recognizable motifs (e.g., a needle, bottari, the artist’s back), it deftly posits a grand unity by addressing various dualities (e.g., self and others, man and woman, wrapping and unfolding, spirit and material, civilization and non-civilization, traditional and contemporary, city and nature).

• Wrapping and unfolding, tying and untying, connecting and disconnecting are the basic acts of Kimsooja’s art. While these acts play a prominent role in her art (especially her bottari and breathing performances), they are not merely formalistic executions. Instead, operating within a vertical-horizontal structural relationship, they link various dualities and enact a shift from material to immaterial. Archive of Mind is the geometry of wrapping and unfolding, acts that enable dots, lines, and planes to come into contact with one another. In that moment, the immaterial is changed into the material, and vice versa. Hence, this geometry of unfolding-and-wrapping is an incessant exploration of the space of materiality and immateriality. Archive of Mind is a psychological geometry that reveals the dynamic relationship between movements and forms, producing surfaces and structures with the potential for motion, while simultaneously searching for a formless form. Summoning the psychological archetype from the “archive of mind,” these works ultimately guide our attention towards an empty void and an intangible space.

• For her special exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Korea in the Hyundai Motors Series 2016, Kimsooja presented nine artworks, including her most recent, which were displayed in the Exhibition Hall 5 and in the courtyard of the Museum’s Seoul branch from July 27, 2016, to February 5, 2017. The exhibition featured artworks of diverse media, both two-dimensional and three-dimensional works, installations, and audio and video. This exhibition offered a rare opportunity to appreciate the breadth of the artist’s work scope and varied use of materials.

• Kimsooja is an established, mid-career artist who has been internationally prominent for almost thirty years. In her previous exhibitions, she has used diverse media and implemented creative ways of installing artworks. Audiences have admired her endeavours to push the envelope of her own creative domain, and had high expectations for what the artist would convey on this occasion. In the titles Kimsooja chose, she deliberately asked viewers to ponder certain meanings in her art. She called the two most prominent works in the exhibition Archive of Mind (Geometry of Mind in Korean) and Geometry of Body, which established an overarching theme that extended throughout the exhibition. This was an invitation for the viewers to look at each piece in the context of either the expansion of body or the expansion of mind. More specifically, viewers were confronted with a dualistic interplay of mind and body. Through the visual extrapolation of these two contrasting but inextricable concepts, Kimsooja unfolded a realm in which one could reflect on the relationship between the substantial and the insubstantial, between the inside and outside of being, or between the self and the world.

• The artist chose to title the exhibition bilingually: its Korean title, Maeummui gihahak, or Geometry of Mind, together with its English title, Archive of Mind, hinted that the exhibition was more than an illustration of the sensory employment of medium or an experimentation with forms of expression. Rather, the exhibition revolved around the metaphysical notions of mind and body. Serious viewers would realize that her goal in this exhibition was not to differentiate her artistic present from the past by demonstrating certain expressive forms in unexpected or unprecedented ways. They were expected to focus on very specific messages that Kimsooja’s artworks signify and find themselves asking questions like: What is the fundamental motivation for her art-making? What is the consistent theme that runs through her works in this exhibition? How should such profound-sounding titles be construed? This essay aims to help the reader revisit these questions and, in the process of seeking answers, come upon discoveries both intended and serendipitous. This would help us experience the epiphany Kimsooja wished to share with all of us through her reflective project at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Korea.

• In most of the writings on Kimsooja, her work is interpreted through conceptual frameworks borrowed from such disciplines as cultural anthropology, psychology, philosophy, religion, sociology, or feminism. This study does not stray far from those frames of reference, but differs in its focus on the concepts of body and mind as manifested in Kimsooja’s art — a viewpoint that has not been pursued in the past. It specifically strives to expound the relationship between mind and body from the perspectives of both Eastern and Western philosophical traditions; I will try to interleave East Asian and European thoughts in relation to the concepts in Kimsooja’s works. Kimsooja has arranged each bundle of her ideas in non-contiguous spaces, which then have to be stitched together with a metaphysical thread across the gaps of discontinuity. This study is organized in the same way — that is, in a structure of non-contiguous thoughts and their synthesis across the discontinuous boundaries to propose a new condition of contemplation.

Body and Mind: Monistic Dualism

• The concept of mind is inherently difficult to grasp. In general, the term mind refers to a person’s personality or character; but it can also mean a metaphysical space that contains a person’s thought or emotion. In English, mind represents the spirit or thought of the brain. The corresponding French word âme means soul or consciousness. The meaning of mind differs somewhat whether the Korean or English term is used. This divergence is probably a result of differences in Eastern and Western thought. In many traditions of European origin, mind and material have been disparate concepts. Mind is a human attribute whereas material is an attribute of things. The human mind stands independent of the external, material world and is subject to rational principles, thus forming a dimension that is separate from the material world, to which the body belongs. This way of thinking is called dualism of mind and body, predicated on the premise that mind and body are independent of each other. However, Eastern thought is not compatible with this kind of dualism. In East Asia, mind and material are deemed interdependent or complementary to each other, forming an inseparable relationship. This view, which has become the basic underpinning of philosophical thinking, treats mind and body as two different manifestations of the same entity. It does not hold that the mind governs over a body seen to be inferior. This is a monism of mind and body, or monistic dualism. According to this view, mind and body originate in and ultimately fuse and return to the state of being one. Oneness is deemed as the fundamental principle of the whole universe; it corresponds to the Great Ultimate (??, taiji) in the Confucian book the I Ching or Yijing (??, Classic of Changes), the universal and absolute principle (?, li) in the teachings of Neo-Confucianism, and nothingness (?, kong) in doctrines of Buddhism.

• Recently, a monism of mind and body has been accommodated by many European thinkers, one of them being Jean-Luc Nancy. In his book Corpus, Nancy focuses on the disparaged status of the body in relation to mind, and attempts to rebalance the conventionally lopsided relationship between the two. The premise of his claims is that the body is der einzelne, meaning that it does not exist in the dominion of the mind, nor is it an existence that is merged with the mind. At the same time, he repudiates the concept of body that is perceived as the opposite to soul or mind. Nancy’s “body” is not a foreign or unfamiliar object to an inner soul (âme, psyché) but a correlator that coexists with soul. To paraphrase, body is the expansion of soul and at the same time the exterior of soul. According to Nancy, the body is opened toward the outside, i.e., it is revealed and unfolded outwards. The body is the soul’s expansion toward the exterior and forms itself as the Other (l’autrui). The soul or the mind, then, is the inner substance of the outer body and, as such, supports the body’s sense of contact. Body and soul form an oppositional pair to each other. This is a monistic dualism as the relationship between body and mind.

• The concept of mind cannot be apprehended by logic or be defined by certain categories or boundaries. In order to discern the concept of mind beyond this impossibility of knowing or the limit of our rational capacity, one has to dispense with the belief in the mind’s self-sufficiency and experience a break from the closed, egocentric self. One must see that the mind is opened toward the outside — the outside which may be called the body, the Other, and the world or the universe. The process of the mind opening up or unfolding toward the outside — thereby breaking out of the subject-centred closedness that endlessly collapses inwards — is what Nancy calls as the expansion of the soul. Through such a process, the soul transcends the limitation of being immanent in itself and enters what both Emmanuel Levinas and Nancy describe as the altruistic coexisting relationship of “being-with.” The characterization of the relationship between mind and body (soul and body) as “being-together” parallels the concept of the “pluralistic singular existence (être singulier pluriel),” which is the essence of ourselves in society. Rather than expand on the relationship of pluralistic singular existence to the democratic community, I intend to connect this concept to the monistic dualism of material and mind, material and non-material, and, by extension, to the monistic dualism of finiteness and infiniteness.

• In his discourse on the expansion of the soul, Nancy set out by addressing the issue of the body among the many facets of the Other. He argues that when the soul tries to reach the body, which is its own Other, as well as the outside, the soul contacts itself through the outer skin of the body, which is its own exposure (l’exposition du soi, l’expeausition). Owing to the ego outside the ego and the body that is the boundary between the self and the world, the soul is able to maintain its balance without leaning toward the inside or the outside. The concept of body, which stands as neither a subject nor an object, in conjunction with the idea of a balanced soul, offers a valuable clue to understanding Kimsooja’s works in this exhibition.

• Nancy’s expansive argument about body and soul leads to a discussion of the existential finiteness of the body and its coexistence in a social context. However, in Kimsooja’s Geometry of Body, the finite coexistence of people is not a matter of importance; her focus is on our original existence that confronts the absolute or the infinite. In that regard, Kimsooja’s work diverges from Nancy’s discourse. Additionally, as a means of approaching the infinite that is the limit of existence, most of Kimsooja’s works involve geometrical structures and a balance that symbolically signify the monistic dualism of body and soul. The geometric balance, with its primordial power, brings about an effect by which we are almost unconsciously drawn into the world of the absolute and the infinite. Facing the overwhelming infinite or absolute, we are awakened from the state of our everyday existence and compelled to turn our eyes towards our original existence. We either avoid facing death or lead a life oblivious to it even though the inevitability of death is embedded in the very foundation of our present existence. If existence comes to grips with death through a constant ontological anxiety, it is said to be in fundamental and inherent authenticity (Eigenlichkeit). It was the philosopher Martin Heidegger who set out this ontological perspective and touched on the issue of “authentic existence” in Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). This authenticity of being metamorphoses the state of everyday “being there” (Dasein) into authentic existence. An authentically finite self anticipates its eventual death and projects (Entwurf) itself into authentic being, thus breaking from the self-contained self.

• In my view, the concept of authentic being is closely aligned with the monistic dualism of mind and body. A human being conceived as a dualistic entity of mind and body is an existence placed on a path to absolute nothingness, or death. Of course, death in Western existentialism is the negation and perishing of being. Little or no attention is paid to the state beyond death. Even though Dasein anticipates its own death, it does not pursue the absolute domain that death ushers in. In contrast, traditional Eastern thought does not consider the death of body and soul to be a perishing, but as either a threshold through which existence enters the absolute world or a stage where existence is united with the infinite world. Therefore the meaning of existence expands to the dynamic absolute (taiji) or nothingness. While the East and the West may differ in their answers to what constitutes authenticity of being, both affirm death to be instrumental in opening up the complete possibility of being, or the ultimate infiniteness that establishes the meaning of our existence.

The Meaning of “Geometry”

• The monistic dualism of body and mind provides an effective framework when we seek to grasp the significance of “geometry” as specified in the titles of works such as Geometry of Body and Geometry of Mind. It is obvious that the artist did not intend geometry to be a mathematical study dealing with figures or space. Kimsooja’s geometry is an intuitive method to help visualize complex ideas around the metaphysical notions of body or mind. The artist, by employing such a geometric method, reminds viewers of the dualistic and agonistic structure of body and mind — or the dualistic structure of material and consciousness, of the finite and the infinite, and of authenticity and non-authenticity of being. Furthermore, through geometric structure, Kimsooja leads each viewer to think of possible aspects of being. Geometry in this case can be understood as a statistician’s method that transforms a great deal of complex information into visual models, or a logician’s method of deductive reasoning in which concrete and evident facts are laid out as the ground for general principles. This methodological approach has helped the artist to avoid being lured into subjective, emotional traps while rendering images and objects in the visual arts. Kimsooja could better convey her ideas to the viewer thanks to intuitive clarity and deductive facility offered by this geometric method. Thus we could argue that her works can be categorized as conceptual art.

• Verticality and horizontality, as key elements of a geometric structure, can effectively represent the ideas underlying a monistic dualism of the body and mind. Since the early 1980s, Kimsooja’s works almost without exception have a structure of verticality and horizontality, with intersections of longitudinal and transversal lines in an orderly fashion. The structure of perpendicular lines intersecting each other and extending in opposite directions displays a sense of expanding movement that unfolds toward infinity, while maintaining balance in the four cardinal directions. This structure creates an open-ended space in which the inside communicates with the outside and movement can take place in any direction. When a vertical and a horizontal line intersect, the four directions come into being. As lines are added through that intersection, the number of directions increases to eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, and so on. In traditional East Asian philosophy and religion, these numbers signify time and space. In the Yijing, the sacred book of Confucianism, sixty-four trigrams symbolize sixty-four directions and represent divergent attributes of being. In the Buddhist scripture Taejanggaemandara, the eight lotus petals called jungdaepalyeobeon — which contain the four Buddhas of east, west, south and north and the four Buddhas of the northeast, southeast, northwest and southwest — symbolize the omnipresence of Buddha throughout the universe. Additionally, the eight or sixteen spokes of the wheel represent the Buddhist Dharma that permeates all directions of the universe. It is also the archetypal image of wonyoongmuae, which means “all things in all directions with no obstructions and in perfect integration.” The vertical and horizontal structure underlying all these concepts may be viewed as the dualistic structure of yin and yang or of heaven and earth, symbolizing the universe as an unhindered infinite space.

• The concept of cheonjiinsamjae, as expounded in the Yijing, offers an interesting perspective on how the universe functions in relation to human beings. It adds the human being to the dualistic order of heaven and earth. Even though the universe initially comprised these two fundamental elements, human beings have come to be an indispensable mediator between heaven and earth, enabling the universe to function at its full capacity. A dualistic view of heaven and earth presumes that the world is just spread between the earth and the sky does not accommodate the use of the human mind, and is devoid of any engagement with human mind or attention. In contrast, the theory of samjaeron, the theory of three generative forces, asserts a role for human beings in the operation of heaven and earth. It raises the status of human beings to the same level , while asserting that human beings are the linchpin that holds together the universe. The inclusion of humans alters the traditional view of nature into a humanistic view of the world. Owing to this shift of views, nature philosophy in the East evolved into a humanistic moral philosophy, as manifested in Confucianism. The Doctrine of the Mean, written by the Confucian scholar Zisi, states that a human being is able to assist in change and operation of the universe and, if he or she is willing, can participate in the ranks of the three generative forces. For this, a person should perfect his or her own “human identity” bestowed by the universe. The Doctrine of the Mean dictates that it is imperative for human identity to be in compliance with the principles of the universe, or li. This is called the axiom of sungjeuklee, which means “human identity equal to the principle of the universe,” and is considered the core proposition of Confucianism. Therefore people should always cultivate their own body and mind so that their human identity is in sync with the principles of the universe — that is, in the state of golden mean. This is a state of balance maintained by a steady mind that does not get disturbed or swayed in any direction. A person in the state of golden mean attains his or her original identity, which is aligned with the principles of the universe, and can effectuate a harmonious world. If the human, who is a significant medium in helping to change and operate the world, is absent or disengaged, what would become of the world? Then, heaven and earth would remain indifferent to each other, separate, without relation, which brings us back to a dichotomous dualism. With humans engaged in conscious efforts to realize the principles of the universe, a dualistic structure is replaced by a monistic dualism of the world.

• Although humans are finite beings, as mediators, they have the potential to reach for heaven in vertical relations and traverse the earth in horizontal relations. The vertical-horizontal structure defines our infinite universe. The encounter of yang, the spirit of heaven, and yin, the spirit of earth, procreates living matter and entities. Of these, only humans can join as the third of the three generative forces of the universe and engage in the operations of heaven and earth. Humans are capable of giving unitary interpretations of the world and of nature, as only humans have mind. According to the Doctrine of the Mean the ideal state of existence is the golden mean, which is alternatively called the middle or composure in the sense that it is the harmonious middle between yin and yang. The notion of composure resonates with ataraxia — “imperturbability,” the composed and stable state of mind and body sought after by the Epicurean School of ancient Greece. They believed human happiness exists in the state of ataraxia just as Confucian scholars asserted that if humans abide by the rule of the golden mean they are able to live a life that is delightful, worry free and happy, a life in which they perceive their own humanity without imbalance or bias.

• The geometry of vertical and horizontal structure embodies a state of calm and composure that does not tilt to one side — this composure of body and mind is similar to what Confucianism pursued. The most fitting image of the stability of mind and body in the state of composure would be one of a vertical and horizontal structure in balance. Kimsooja may not have intentionally predicated her works on the propositions of Confucianism or, more precisely, Neo-Confucianism, however, it cannot be denied that her framework parallels them quite aptly. Just as Heidegger argued for the existential being to be authentic (to stay in existential anxiety by facing death and thereby overcoming the dualism between existence and nothingness), Confucian philosophies pursued a more positive human existence that communicates with the infinite and the absolute — a spatial and temporal realm that cannot be experienced. Confucianism in particular emphasized the universe as the root of the beginning and end, of the world of yin and yang. The basic tenet of Confucianism lies in the harmonization of human identity with the cardinal rule of the universe and living a balanced life in accordance with the order of yin and yang.

• Kimsooja’s Geometry of Mind, an installation that was shown for the first time in this exhibition, prompts us to closely analyze the mind and realize it indeed is unified with the body as one and at the same time is related to authentic human identity. As there is no way to define this mind, we instead have to observe what state the mind exists in. When we observe our own mind, we realize that it initially has no shape or movement — it exists in a state of potential. It is only when a stimulus enters that the mind moves and arises; it oscillates to the state of reality filled with perception and emotion. The mind’s tranquil state of potential, while traversing through the time and space of our reality, transforms into a state of “being real” and reveals itself in this process. One of the annotations to the Yijing refers to the state of mind that has not yet been revealed to the outside as “the mind being calm and undisturbed.” In comparison, the state of mind that is revealed and able to respond is referred to as “the mind feeling and communicating.” Cheng Yi, a renowned Confucian scholar, wrote that a “calm and undisturbed state” is the original body of mind, and the state of “mind feeling and communicating” is the operation of mind. He postulated a duality of mind as an a priori state and an experienced state.

• Since the nature of mind cannot be seen or touched, Confucians viewed it as empty. Buddhists viewed the mind as nothingness. Nevertheless, the mind is not completely empty. The energy of yin and yang is implicitly embedded in the mind. When the mind that has remained calm, it takes an orientation toward something at a given moment, the energy of yin and yang is activated, enabling the mind to feel. This energy allows the mind to realize or embody itself through time and space, and also allows the mind to change into various shapes. Zhu Xi, the founder of Neo-Confucianism in the Song period, compared the nature of the mind to a mirror that is clean and clear, and explained that emotion is something reflected on the mirror of the mind — that is, a reflection of the mind’s mysterious movement. He referred to the change and function of the human mind as “mysterious perception, sensation and judgment”. This mysterious function of mind has two aspects: one is the self-control of trifling emotions and desires generated by the body, and the other is the moral or ethical mind, which is based on human identity. The ethical intelligence refers to a mind that feels shame when it sees something that is not right and detests injustice, a mind of humility and accommodation for other people, and a mind that can discern right from wrong. This mind comes from a place of truth and must be encouraged. This ethical mind provides clues for understanding four personalities: gentle and virtuous, righteous, polite and civil, and wise and sagacious. The mind based on human identity acts as a swinging pendulum, gradually leading us to a state of balanced composure as well as a state of authentic being.

• Eastern essence-function theory states that the mind would be in a peaceful pause when the body is also paused, and the mind would respond and feel once the body is activated. In other words, states of the mind are understood to match states of the body. This postulation of a mind-body identity is predicated on the theory that both mind and body are subject to the same energies of yin and yang. For this reason, a human being is defined as one and at the same time as two, entailing an argument that a human being can be split in two while maintaining its wholeness. This is the unification of matter and mind. In relation to the tranquility and movement of the mind, Nancy discusses something of note in Corpus. He paraphrased a quotation from Freud that came to light after his death: “the soul is unfolding (étendue) outwards, [but of the movement of being unfolded,] nothing is known.” If we substitute this “soul” for “mind,” we can see that that mind resides peacefully inside and then migrates outward and unfolds itself. The mind is not able to perceive its own movement of expansion because its unfolding is carried out unconsciously and quietly. However, if the unfolded mind makes contact with the body, the body of the mind would move towards the outside and evoke the unification of stillness and movement in the manner of twoness (mind and body) within one (the self) and oneness within twoness. Nancy makes clear that the self’s “unknowing” is the authentic self, and the process of the soul moving toward the outside, registering bodily sensation and going through thoughts and experiences, is the means of the unification of stillness and movement through which the unity of mind and body is exposed to world. Neo-Confucianism long ago explained the phenomenon of the mind being unified with the body (that is its own outside) and expanding toward the world through its essence-function theory.

• Nothing could illustrate the stillness and then movement of the mind more vividly and persuasively than an experience that came upon Kimsooja one day in 1983, when she was sewing a bedcover with her mother. Suddenly she came to an important realization:

• Through the banal activity of sewing a bed cover with my mother, I experienced a surprising sensation that my own thoughts, sensitivity and action were all integrated. That unifying sensation was so private and surprising. At that moment, I was able to find some kind of possibility that can include within itself countless memories, pain, as well as affection and love in life, all of which I had buried within me until that moment. The warp and weft as the fabric’s basic structure, the raw sense of colour of our own fabric, the unification of the action of sewing up and through the two-dimensional fabric, the fabric and myself and the strange nostalgia that all of this evoked...with all of this I was completely enchanted.
  Later, when describing this experience again, she recounted that when the sharp needle poked into the fabric, she felt the energy of the universe suddenly penetrating through her whole body. This surprising epiphanic experience not only marked the origin of her Sewing series but also helped form the spiritual archetype for her oeuvre. The coincidence of the tension of mind with that of the body in the act of sewing brought memories and emotions that had been buried deep inside the mind to the threshold of the unconscious. This in turn electrified and moved the artist’s body and mind. Kimsooja described how this experience of the unification of her mind and body gave birth to Sewing, in which the meaning of the needle and thread is rooted in oneness of mind and body. Just as mind and body are two sides of a real being, needle and thread are as one and, as a unified entity, do the work of sewing the fabric — which symbolizes the outside world or the infinite space between heaven and earth. In the installation Archive of Mind, the participants are given an opportunity to experience the same kind of epiphany through the ritualistic act of forming clay balls rolled between their hands.

• When one is touched by an artwork, his or her mind is stimulated in response: “the tranquil and unstirred mind” begins to “communicate and stir” in response to the stimulus, thus, revealing itself. In the Sewing series, Kimsooja’s artworks have been structured in a way to best resonate with the stillness and the movement of mind. The bed cover is worked with needle and thread that symbolize the oneness of body and mind. The fabric, smoothly spread out, is a horizontal structure that accommodates the movement of the mind traversing over it. Against the backdrop of the horizontal fabric, the vertical movement of sewing through the warps and wefts represents the unfolding of the mind. The mind, in sync with the hand-movement of sewing, eventually brings to the surface the nature of being and emotion that has been sequestered in the unconscious. It is not just the repetitive hand movement that stirs the stillness of mind; the artist’s mind and body are stimulated on multiple levels. For example, the colorful, traditional fabric Kimsooja uses serves as a strong stimulus for the visual and tactile senses. Furthermore, the artist is inspired by the cultural implications of these silk fabrics. The vertical and horizontal structures in Kimsooja’s work are the most conspicuous visual stimuli that inspire the viewers.

• ...

• The artist’s working method, which is to join squares of fabric along their widths and lengths and multiply them by sewing, also aligns with the structure of verticality and horizontality. To the question of what Geometry of Mind and Geometry of Body mean, answers may be found if one understands the principles of the three generative forces and the manifestation of heaven, earth, and human. Now let’s delve further into the geometry of the vertical and horizontal structure.

• As suggested above, the geometry of the vertical and horizontal structure has nothing to do with reifying certain idealistic concepts, nor with the identification and classification of conceptual objects in a geometric lattice. The geometry of the vertical-horizontal structure in this essay refers to a method that helps one intuit the infiniteness of the universe or the intrinsic nature of the uncertainty of being, as well as intuit the state of balance between dualistic, antagonistic elements such as body and mind, or yin and yang. Geometric structuralization is a method to facilitate the observation and reflection of complex, often conceptual, notions. It is necessary to rely on such methods in order to have categorical, systematic or structural unity when contemplating the essence of the indeterminate consciousness called mind. Through this method we are able to reach the intuition of and reflect on such topics as body and mind, or yin and yang, all of which are indefinable by knowledge.

• In a similar vein, Julia Kristeva, a semiologist, opts for a dualistic system of the semiotic and the symbolic in order to explain how the signification of poetic language is ingenerated from pulsion, which exists under the consciousness. It is, in fact, impossible to formulate the disorderliness and pulsation that flows and moves into a state of segmentation in a self-evident logic or axiom. Nonetheless, Kristeva hypothesizes that pulsion, the drive of desire, generates the ultimate signification of the text. She divides the process of signification into the strata of semiotic and symbolic, and investigates the interaction of these two. Consequently, she claims that signification is ingenerated out of the semiotic field in which the fragmented pulsion is condensed and subsequently connected to the symbolic field in which law, order, and social consciousness are concentrated. In other words, the two conflicting categories are connected in such a way that the semiotic mobility engages with the symbolic order, the former moving into the latter to compose signification.

• There can be many possible interpretations for the vertical and horizontal structure that characterizes Kimsooja’s work. One would be as follows: (a) the expansion of mind construed as the expansion of the energy of pulsion in the field of the semiotic, (b) the integration of the body with the outside world interpreted as the unification with society and history in the symbolic field, and (c) the monistic dualism of body and mind construed as the formation of signification generated from the cooperation of the semiotic and the symbolic. The mind is the realm that is indefinite and uncertain, like the field of the semiotic. Yet it can be said that the mind’s own expanding energy — that is, the body — creates the meaning of “being” along with the order of the symbolic, such as sewing, the hand movement of rolling clay balls, or the somatic movement of yoga. As for how the pulsion that moves across the artist’s body and mind gives rise to certain meanings in the process of sewing, that is, at the moment of “poking the sharp needle” into the fabric, the artist explained: I experienced a surprising sensation that my own thoughts, sensitivity and action were all integrated. That unifying sensation was so private and surprising. At that moment, I was able to find some kind of possibility that can include within itself countless memories, pain, as well as affection and love in life, all of which I had buried within me until that moment. [...] the strange nostalgia that all of this evoked...with all of this I was completely enchanted.

• Kimsooja mused that the meaning of her works is forged when subconscious memories and feelings are introduced to the consciousness, causing her to reflect on the innate nature of being. Is this not the true role of art? Art should let the artist’s hidden desires that have been forgotten or hidden in the mundane or everyday to be truly unfolded and expanded onto the horizon of the consciousness, and enable her or him to experience the epiphanic moment of recovering the original emotion and nature of being. It is for this reason that I sincerely recommend viewers immerse themselves and directly participate in the process through which the artist creates the meaning of her art, thereby relishing the opportunity to relive their own memories and feelings as well as intuit the nature of being.

• JS : How would you define your work?

• K : I view my work as a threshold: “any place or point of entering or beginning, a magnitude or intensity that must be exceeded for a certain reaction, phenomenon, result, or condition to occur or be manifested.”

• JS : Would you call some of your works self-portraits? Is it important that you yourself are in some works?

• K : In some ways, my work could be viewed as a self-portrait. I do not wish to display my personal identity in my work—especially in the video performances when my back is facing the viewer—but the position demonstrated does show a certain kind of identity. I think a person’s back can be one of the most evocative parts of the human body; it isn’t dynamic, but it presents a profound and abstract encapsulation of a person.

• JS : How do you consider the globalized world?

• K : A globalized world sounds very positive, dynamic, interconnected: a constant flow of cultural, economic, technological, and intellectual interactions. But we face many visible and invisible divisions created by constant border crossings: racial, economic, political, and religious conflicts. The standardization of daily life under globalism could benefit those who need it most, but we lose the authenticity, spirituality, and the myth of a land and its people. Globalism reduces the uniqueness and specificity of humanity, although new technology will bring a new facet.

• JS : What do you think of migration today?

• K : More than five million Syrians have migrated to Greece, Turkey, Germany, and nearby countries; there is a constant flow from Africa to Southern Italy and Spain; people from Mexico and Central and Latin America try to get to the United States. As an artist who has always been concerned with borders, migration, and refugee issues, especially from living near the Korean Demilitarized Zone during my childhood, I am shocked by President Trump’s decision to block borders, deny immigrants a new life in the United States, and deport second-generation immigrants.
  American citizens have to pay attention to this humanitarian issue, especially since only a few organizations and individuals are focused on the refugee crisis. Major European countries are taking risks to support and help the refugees. Along with global warming, it is the most urgent issue of our time.

• JS : Your work deals with exile and displacement. Do you feel exiled too?

• K : Definitely. I have considered myself a cultural exile since 1999. Recently, I’ve collaborated with Korean-specific projects, such as Année France-Corée for a solo show at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2015 and the MMCA Hyundai Motor 2016 project. Still, my position as an artist remains that of an outsider rather than insider, even though I’ve been well received. Perhaps it is the fundamental nature of being an artist?

• JS : You have lived in New York for several years, how have things changed for you?

• K :Thanks to support from Arts Council Korea in 1992, I was able to participate in the P.S. 1 studio residency program in New York. I met people who understood my work and viewed it objectively, with enthusiasm and generosity. It really opened up possibilities for me. Due to the Korean financial crisis in the late 1990s, I was not able to receive financial and intellectual support for my work. It truly disappointed me and made me realize that I needed to find support outside Korea.
  In the last ten years, this has changed dramatically and Korea is now one of the most supportive countries in the world. However, when I go back to Korea, I am too established to get support from my country. The level of professionalism still needs to be raised, especially in governmental organizations.
  Where to live, work, and die are big questions. You need a nation to live—but you don’t need a nation to die.

• JS : The idea of displacement is very present within your work.

• K : All good art is made from thinking outside the box. In that sense, having displacement as a condition of life is not a bad choice for an artist.

• JS : In some of your works, like A Needle Woman (1999–2001, 2005, 2009), immobility rather than displacement is present. Is it a way to show personal identity toward the global world?

• K : In my practice, the notion of duality and its complex geometry and disorder are always present through my understanding of the world. While I am presenting my immobility, which is impossible in literal terms, a lot of mobility happens in my body and mind, allowing me to reach to the place and moment of my performances. This immobility gives me an anchor to hold onto, so my journey flows through immobility.

• JS : Some of your works and installations are made with bottari, meaning, “to pack for a trip.” Which trip are you addressing?

• K : The bottari represent our body and skin, their agony and memory as a wrapped frame for life. Bottari are the simplest way of holding objects or belongings that embody many meanings and temporal dimensions. A trip could be a simple A-to-B, or a relocation, or a separation of a couple in feminist terms, wrapping only the most essential belongings in an emergency—migration, exile, or our final journey: death.

• JS : Do you consider yourself as a nomad?

• K : Yes, fundamentally.

• JS : Your work is an invitation to a sensorial and visual trip—a way to travel without moving.

• K : We can easily grasp what is going on in this hyper-informed society, but we can’t experience true reality, not in depth. All experiences are limited by the conditions of space and time; I am determined to witness the here and now, living through my eyes and body, sharing my experiences with the audiences.

• JS : In the emblematic work, A Needle Woman, you stand in moving crowds. Who was this needle woman? And who is she now?

• K : A Needle Woman is a woman who gazes at the world, gazing at and witnessing the world without acting. She allows us to take a journey to reality and reach for the ontological root—our destiny. She is there as a tool, a question, a permanency; I am here as a temporality.

• JS : In your installation To Breathe – A Mirror Woman (2006), shown in Madrid, we can hear your own breathing, filling the space. What is your relationship to the body and the act of breathing?

• K : I’ve always reinterpreted and recontextualized existing concepts, depending on the site, the questions I had, and the relationship to other works and sites. This installation has three different components from past projects. The Weaving Factory (2004), was my first sound performance, I overlapped my breathing and humming; it developed from the idea of my body as a weaving machine, inspired by an old textile factory in Lodz, Poland, for the First Lodz Biennale. Later, I worked on a video installation commissioned by Teatro La Fenice, Venice, called To Breathe (2006), which incorporated The Weaving Factory. La Fenice is an opera house and singing is about breathing. When I was invited to make a work for the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid, I brought all of these elements together, contextualized as a bottari and as a void. Attaching the diffraction film to the architecture was an act of wrapping and unfolding the daylight into a rainbow spectrum.

• JS : One of your upcoming projects is a work for the new subway station at Mairie de Saint-Ouen in Paris.

• K : Although it is a site-specific and permanent installation, this project brings me back to the body/work and audience/pedestrian relationships in A Needle Woman. This installation will symbolize another body of mine, one that witnesses the station’s pedestrians. The diffraction film installation will function as my body, standing still in the station and witnessing the pedestrians, while offering the public a forum.

• JS : You were teaching at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. What is your connection to Paris?

• K : Paris was the first western city I visited; I stayed for six months in the mid-1980s. A scholarship from the French government allowed me to work at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in the lithography studio. Whenever I had a project in Europe in past thirty years, I’ve also visited Paris, even if I didn’t have any particular reason.
  During my six-month stay in Paris, I traveled to other European cities for the first time, visiting major museums in Germany, Italy, Holland, and England. I was 27 years old. I absorbed the language, art, culture, and life in Paris, they are forever in my memory. In 1985 at the Biennale de Paris, I first encountered John Cage’s work. Although I knew of him as an avant-garde composer, I had never heard his music live, or seen any of his visual works. With great curiosity, I entered an empty railway car to hear his sound piece, but there was only silence and a simple written statement, “Que vous essayez de le faire ou pas, le son est entendu” (“Whether we try to make it or not, the sound is heard”).
  It was interesting that I learned so much from an American avant-garde composer, rather than from European art or artists, although I was aware of the French Supports/Surfaces group and the influential artists at the time. After my encounter with Cage’s work, I became curious about American art and culture for the first time.
  I’ve shown quite often in France, the French government and institutions have supported many of my works, and I owe them a lot. I was admitted to the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Minister of Culture for my modest contribution to French culture. I have a love for Paris and French culture and want to spend more time working there.

• JS : What new avenues are you exploring?

• K : Since 2010 I’ve been working on a 16mm film series titled Thread Routes, filming textile cultures from around the world: Peruvian weavings (chapter I), European lacemaking (chapter II), Nomadic Indian textiles (chapter III), Chinese embroidery (chapter IV), Native American weaving (chapter V), and African textiles (chapter VI). I can’t wait to visit Africa to film soon. Since 2016, I have realized a large-scale participatory installation titled Archive of Mind, firstly for a solo exhibition at the National Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, as part of the MMCA Hyundai Motor Series. This project is evolving and was presented at the Intuition exhibition at Palazzo Fortuny in Venice this year, and opens up to explore the sculptural aspect of my practice from the position of a painter.
  There is also a new installation at Nijo Castle, Kyoto, commissioned by the Culture City of East Asia, with the title Asian Corridor; it’s a ten-panel folding mirror screen on a mirrored floor, entitled Encounter – A Mirror Woman (2017). This is my second East Asian City project, the first, in Nara, was Deductive Object (2016), a black sculpture, inspired by an Indian ritual stone called Brahmanda (a cosmic egg in Hindu culture), installed on top of a mirror panel.
  These works redefine the geometry of bottari and the surface of the symbolic bottari that represents the totality of the universe. I want to explore further what this could bring to my future practice. I am also starting new clay works. All of these are exciting, new directions to keep exploring, and I am very curious about the outcome.

• JS : How do you see the future?

• K : The future doesn’t exist anymore—it is past.

• H.H : Letís start with travel. Today, we are constantly traveling: last week we were in New York and now youíre in Berlin and Iím in Rome. Traveling has become a norm of contemporary life, both in the everyday and in the artistic. . . .

• K : Yes, traveling has become increasingly common in this era. In a way, we are living and working on the move.

• H.H : So this is really a state of being. Traveling is also a very important aspect in your work. From the beginning, you reflected on the question of identity from a female perspective, using traditional Korean textiles with your Bottari works. This question is also addressed from another perspective, that of an artist who is constantly traveling and moving. You look at the world through the lens of a nomad. Traveling has become a common motivation for people to reflect on the subject of identity.

• K : Yes, definitely.

• H.H : On the other hand, travel has become a way of life, donít you think?

• K : Traveling has always been a part of my life. From a young age, I lived in various cities and villages, moving every couple of years within South Korea, including the Demilitarized Zone where my father served. Sorok Island, where my husband and I lived during his military service as a psychiatrist, was especially isolated from the public because it was used as a national hospital for leprosy patients. As a member of a nomadic family, traveling became my reality. My visual experience and perspective on nature and humanity have developed significantly from these transitory places and moments. One important experience was in 1978 when Hongik University, which I attended, started an exchange program with Osaka University; it was an eye opening experience about Korea and Korean cultural identity. Although Japan is only a short distance away, the trip altered my perception of Asian cultures and their differences. This began my investigation of my culture, such as the structural elements of architecture, furniture, language, nature, and sense of colors. I rediscovered that the aesthetics, the sensibilities of colors and forms, are very different in Korea and Japan. This period coincided with my investigation of the horizontal and vertical structures in nature, canvas, and all types of cruciform visual elements. This was the subject of my thesis, focusing on the cross in ancient and contemporary art. In 1984, I received a scholarship to the …cole nationale supÈrieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, to study printmaking for six months. It was my first exposure to European art and ancient culture; as a result, I started to inquire what is new in art and culture after European art history, and became interested in learning about American culture.

• H.H : This led to a new direction in your life and work. Also, your traveling changed from national to international, from local to global. In the meantime, the image of bottari was introduced to represent this tension, between trying to be at home and travelling across the world. . . .

• K : I didnít realize that my family had been wrapping and unwrapping bottaris all the time until I worked on Cities on the Move ñ 2,727 km Bottari Truck (1997), a performance and video project for the Cities on the Move exhibition, which you and Hans Ulrich Obrist curated in 1997. It marked a turning point in my work from local to global travel. I hadnít considered that I was dealing with global travel, as the journey was deeply personal. It was a record of my familyís roots, but many people thought the project was dealing with globalism. Maybe thatís true, in the sense that the performance can represent migration. Cities on the Move traveled to so many cities; the title served as its destiny and global exchange in the arts had been launched.

• H.H : Can you talk about your move to New York?

• K : I consider my move to New York as a ìcultural exileî from Korean society. It was the moment when I made more critical performances: the series A Needle Woman (1999ñ2001), A Homeless Woman (2000ñ2001), and A Beggar Woman (2000ñ2001). I made them right after I moved to New York during a transitional periodóI felt like I was stepping off a cliff, with one foot already in the air. This risky move made me reflect on my surroundings and the human condition more critically. I started living in Berlin recently, although I am not sure if it will be for the long term. Itís interesting because it brings me back to when I established myself in New York in the late 1990s. That was a very difficult moment for me, every single step of the way, adjusting to a new society. Currently I am located in the Moabit area, which is a multicultural neighborhood. I like it, but I feel alienated. As an artist, I cherish this ambiguous state; distance and alienation bring me to a more objective and critical perception. I want to keep that critical distance all the time and New York provides that. Each time I arrive back in New York, I find a new definition, or have a specific feeling about New York, one that I havenít had before. When I feel that Iím losing perspective, I relocate myself, but I cannot deny that I somewhat respect the familiarity and rhythms of mundane life.

• H.H : You have spoken of being a Korean woman growing up in a family influenced by Confucianism. Obviously, you were aware of very important social and political changes in Korea in the 1980s and 1990s. Maybe growing up in a military family allowed you to experience this change in a way that other people would not? How much has this background influenced your way of thinking and art making? Was there was a moment of emancipation from this background?

• K : Both of my parents were from Catholic families and very open-minded; however, as my father was the only son, he had to follow the traditional Confucian ways, which were deeply rooted in Korean society.
  As a military family, we lived in temporary and sometimes dangerous places, like refugees, migrating from one place to another. During my elementary school years, I lived near the Demilitarized Zone, in and around Cheorwon and Daegwang-ri, the second to last stop on the Kyung-Eui train line, which used to run all the way to North Korea. We often heard stories about North Korean spies who snuck into South Korea, and there were casualties every now and then. We didnít live far from a mined area; kids played with the spent bullets and would get injured by the landmines. I am of the generation, born a few years after the Korean War, who really experienced the conditions of the war and the conflict that it brought to our daily lives. Iíve always been aware of the Other, because of my daily experience with the border. My thoughts on borders and those living on the other side made me question the relationship between myself and the Other. The idea of a border and questioning it had to do with being a painteróreacting to the canvas as another border. I tried to overcome this border, or limit, in front of me, and connect with the Other. This was also part of the psychology in my sewing practice. The act of wrapping, with bottaris, is a way of three-dimensional sewing; it is unifying in that sense. Borders have always been part of an underlying psychology and challenge in my work.

• H.H : In the 1980s Korea transitioned from a military dictatorship to a democracy. You began exhibiting your work during this period, can you describe your early exhibition experiences?
  I started showing in 1978 when I was in my third year at Hongik University; it was a two-person show at the Growrich Gallery in Seoul. I hung a series of transparent films on a laundry line; they were silkscreened with images of a traditional Korean doorframe taken in a forest, one showed me holding it from behind and one was without me. I also installed two pieces of wood, inserting Plexiglas between them, with the wood blocks slightly tilted and following the curves of the wood. The other artist was my classmate Lee Yoon-Dong, who experimented by dripping black coal tar pigment on canvas; the work questioned gravity and materiality and its rhythm. I showed a few times in Japan and Taiwan in the mid- to late-1980s and in the US after the early 1990s, but it was not until the mid-1990s that I started to exhibit more globally. Some shows included Division of Labor: Womenís Work in Contemporary Art at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1995), the First Gwangju Biennale (1995), and Manifesta 1 at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1996).
  Globalism has expanded and affected much of our thinking about our way of making art, and our way of living. It seems almost inevitable to work globally, especially as I work a lot with site-specific performances, installations, and videos.
  Many female artists were extremely active and audacious in their workóoften performancesóduring this transitional period in the 1990s. Lee Bul is another well-known female artist. How did you feel about this? And why did you decide to leave Korea in 1999, right after participating in the Twenty-fourth S„o Paulo Biennial (1998)?

• K : In the 1990s, female artists, including myself, were engaged in performances using their bodies. I think that had to do with womenís social status in Korea at that time. Many female artists were associated with feminism. But performance art was already popular in the 1970s and 1980s in Korea, under the rubric of Happenings or Events, mostly by the Avant-Garde group, or the S. T group, which was entirely male, except one female artist, Chung Kang-Ja. During the mid-1990s, women did not have the equality they have nowómuch of our daily lives was governed by a patriarchal Confucian value system.
  After my residency at P.S. 1, Long Island City, NY (1992ñ93), my first solo show was at Seomi Gallery in Seoul; I showed three of my first performance videos Sewing into Walking ñ Kyungju, Yang Dong Village, and Mai Mountain (1994), and a Bottari installation. Used clothes were also installed on the gallery floor together with rows of TV monitors with Bottaris as a ìmedia Bottari,î and surveillance camera footage of re-wrapping the space of the wrapped Bottaris. These works could have been easily associated with feminism, but I refused the feminist label, owing to the formal and conceptual elements of my Bottaris, and my approach to universality. As a female artist, it was not easy to survive in this hierarchical and patriarchal society, or even in the global art world, until now. I noticed Korean social and cultural issues more clearly after my return from the P.S 1 residency. At the same time, economic development changed Korean society, which was quickly shaken by the financial crisis starting in 1997. I was chosen to represent Korea for the Twenty-fourth S„o Paulo Biennial, but I couldnít get any state support, only from a couple of individuals and a commission from ARCO. Korea wasnít able to ship my Cities on the Move ñ 11,633 Miles Bottari Truck (1998) from Korea to S„o Paulo. I felt hopeless and disappointed by my country, and I had to accept personal support from Korean-Brazilian immigrants who had heard about my situation. This situation confirmed my decision to find support elsewhere, so I moved to New York.
  I established myself as an artist without much support from my home country until recently. After the late 1990s financial crisis, the slowly growing Korean art market and Korean journalism often misled audiences by promoting marketable and status-oriented artists. My career trajectory is totally different from that of older and younger generations, who constantly receive support from the state and their galleries.

• H.H : Around that period, several important art movements were created by students to oppose the power of the establishment.

• K : Minjung Art was one and there were many modernist and postmodernist group activities that were against the established movements, such as Nanjido and Metavox from the mid-1980s. The newer groups were organized by artists from Hongik University, where I studied. Other groupsóMuseum, TARA, Logos and Pathówere also around. I kept myself completely independent, although I was friends with some of the members.

• H.H : Minjung Art and artists from your generation represented a tendency toward conceptual and experimental forms of creation, especially performance and installation. What was your role?

• K : Prior to my generation, there were experimental modernist group movements, such as the Avant-Garde and S. T. groups, which coexisted with the Dansaekhwa artists. I didnít follow Dansaekhwa art theory or practice, although the theories were predominant at Hongik University. Also, there was a big age gap between my generation and the Dansaekhwa members.
  When I was at Hongik University attending undergraduate and graduate school (1976ñ1980 and 1982ñ84), the Minjung Art movement was slowly happening and I knew a few of the leading members. We would meet casually in a study group, as I was intellectually interested for some time, but when they wanted me to join, I couldnít because I always had a certain resentment about focusing only on political issues and such dogmatism. I couldnít connect with the aggression of some of the political art. At that time I was making art that was abstract, performative, conceptual, and spiritual.
  I had zero interest in any group or collective activities. I always kept myself independent by questioning the monopoly of the Dansaekhwa group, to which most of my professors belonged. I voiced my opinions in classes to open up the dialogue, offering my fellow students different possibilities and perspectives. I kept myself completely isolated, to be independent from political and artistic hierarchies, to preserve my own integrity. It has been a long and lonely path. To address further your question about my role in performance and installation in a Korean art context: the large scale of my site-specific installations and global performance projects in the 1990s and early 2000s might have influenced a younger generation in Korea, as I see many are expanding their practices. Iíve noticed that some of my interestsóthe notion of the needle, thread, wrapping, and unfoldingóhave achieved wider currency in current contemporary art, particularly in art concerned with the body, textiles, and everyday life.

• H.H : People often identify you as a leading figure, together with a few younger artists such as Lee Bul or Choi Jeong-Hwa. They express similar positions, confronting the status quo, social and political situations. Lee Bulís work is a kind of counter-violence against oppression, while your work is much more related to meditation and transcendence. You use intimate materials such as textiles and bottaris. How did you arrive at this language?

• K : I cannot associate with any type of violence or raw expression. In that sense, Iíve been working closely with non-violence and that is my position to the individual and society. I couldnít and didnít engage directly with political issues. The artistic language that I created has always stemmed from a healing perspective, maybe because of my compassion for humanity and my vulnerability to violence.
  This vulnerability might be rooted in my childhood experience of living near the Korean border, among others. I felt innately vulnerable. I cannot watch scenes of violence and my inclination has always been to embrace and connect with those around me. However, it is true that I gain strength through resistance and patience. Maybe this mindset originated when I discovered sewing and needlework as a methodology for healingódespite the violent potential of a needle. Searching for my own medium, I focused on vertical, horizontal, and cruciform structures in the world. In 1983, when I was making a bedcover with my mother, I was about to push the needle into the brilliant, soft, and silky fabricóbut when the needle touched the fabric, I experienced a revelation, as if the whole universeís energy passed through my body to the tip of the needle. I immediately recognized the relation with this border, the surface, and the vertical and horizontal woven structure that was penetrated by the needle. The fabric had a woven vertical and horizontal pattern (warp and weft) and I saw this as a way to investigate the surface of a structure as a painting. This action and experience was the moment that I ìinterwoveî myself as a person who is innately vulnerable, seeking to connect with and embrace those around me.
  At the same time this experience coincided with my artistic struggle to redefine the structure of the surface of a canvas. Iíd been trying to find an original painting methodology for a number of years, since beginning college. That was the moment I discovered sewing as a methodology for painting, using the fabric of life as a canvas and the needle as a brush. The concept of needle and sewing evolved naturally into social, cultural, and political dimensions and has expanded with a broader context into my current practice.

• H.H : For many years, you have developed this process of wrapping and unwrapping bedcovers, carrying them on your travels, and showing them as installations. They are more than luggage, more like real companions. They have become your partner as you travel. Itís like having a life that you can carry around with you in your global displacements. During the last few years you extended this interest, engaging with textiles from other cultures and places. For example, you went to Peru to work with the local women and filmed the weaving culture, called Thread Routes ñ Chapter I (2010).

• K : Yes, Thread Routes continued with Chapter II (2011) filming lace making in European countries, block printing, embroideries and weavings in India (Chapter III, 2012), embroideries in China (Chapter IV, 2014), and basket weavings in Native American communities (Chapter V, 2016). I am also planning to film weaving in African cultures (Chapter VI).

• H.H : That gives your vision broader cultural dimensions.

-K : I consider the Thread Routes films as a retrospective of my formal practices related to thread and needle, with the textile as a canvas and a structural investigation. It was conceived in 2002 in Bruges, when I first saw a bobbin lace maker on a street. It immediately inspired me to juxtapose it with the local architectural structures, as a sort of masculine lacemaking, but it took a long time to start the actual film. I finally started, using 16 mm film, with textiles in Peruvian culture. Itís a non-narrative documentary film, using only visual juxtapositions with minimal environmental sound. I wanted to approach this project as ìanthropological poetry,î capturing the long, silent journey of textile cultures around the world, revealing similarities and differences, different production methods. Through the cameraís lens, I wanted to reveal each cultureís craftsmanship as a living form in textile, in architecture, and in nature.
I didnít use Korean secondhand bedcovers because I was interested in orientalism or local aesthetics, but because they were part of my daily life in Korean society. Itís the same reason that Europeans or Americans use their local materials, so there is nothing exotic about them, although Westerners might view them that way. The material I chose for the Bottari works was not originally wrapping cloth. Initially, I chose a bedcover for wrapping as the bed is the place for our bodies to rest, as a frame of life where we are born, love, dream, suffer, and die. This symbolic site carries all of our dreams, love, agony, pain, and despair throughout our lives. The colors are striking and have extreme contrasts, but I didnít choose the colors for aesthetic reasons, they just came with the fabric as cultural symbols, symbols of the daily life that I lived. I accepted what was created and what was handed down from our parents upon marriage. The wrapping and unwrapping is another language I discovered when looking at an existing bottari bundle in 1993. Bottaris are common universal objects, existing in all cultures, but the bottaris I discovered at my P.S. 1 studio appeared to me in a completely different context: a totally different object that was a painting in the form of a wrapped canvas, a ready-used object, a sculpture, and a performed object that unifies the form as a totality.

• H.H : One of your recent projects, An Album: Sewing into Borderlines (2013), is on the American-Mexican border, initiated a few years ago under the federal General Services Administration Art in Architecture Program. In the beginning, you wanted to work with people who had been deported from the US, but since the GSA could not accommodate that project, you shifted to working with migrants who cross the US-Mexican border every day to work.

• K : In the end, I focused more on the positive, welcoming aspects of migration for the different generations of Mexican immigrants traveling to the US. It was during the Obama administration, when artists were supported during the economic crisisómore about hospitality than despair.

• H.H : But now the policy of the new government forces you to raise new questions about the issue. The political structure under Trump is a different situation. How will this change influence your project? You have been interested in female migrants, who have a very different life and experience with migration than men do.

• K : Women are central to the migration chain; they are the major nexus, connecting everyone in the family. Women travel on more visible routes like trains, cars, and buses, which makes them more vulnerable to arrest. Generally one-third of women are deported. Men use riskier methods, on foot through the desert or by boat. There are even tunnels dug under the border. Female migration is more transitional. Women work for others, generally in homes or little stores during their migrations. They stay in one place for a short time, earn some money, and then move on.

• H.H : You developed this project along the US-Mexican border, where migrants are both caught and detained.

• K : The GSA project, which is a permanent installation at the land port of entry in Mariposa, Arizona, was installed right on the border. I installed large LED screens with portraits of the immigrants who cross the border, commuting to work every day. I filmed each portrait from the front and back, showing each personís psychological journey in a durational gaze. I would call their names and they would turn to the camera, creating a psychological border between themselves and the Otherófirst the camera and then the public. I focused on the juxtaposition of their psychological borders with the political border where the work is installed.
  I learned a lot about the border situation between Mexico and the US. Lately, the social, political, and cultural geography has shifted because of Trumpís immigration policies, especially with Mexico. This new view on immigration is the most urgent and critical issue to address right now.
  I began to research the new reality Mexican immigrants are facing since last year. There are interesting organizations that support womenís migration, including El Instituto para la Mujeres en la Migr·cion (Institute for Women in Migration). Interestingly, the organization is supported mainly by American non-profit organizations. I researched the conditions of women migrating in South America, especially in Mexico. Thereís a constant migration through Mexico. The organizations support detained family members, women, or children, by providing shelter, educational programs, and further support. Families get separated, sometimes women are detained and sent back to Mexico, but if their kids were born in the US, then the children enter the care of these organizations. The children are then moved to a shelter where their mothers cannot see them. Once in the shelters, American families can adopt the children and change their names. Basically the mothers no longer have any rights to their children after they are adopted. So, there are efforts to reunite these families. It is not only a migration issue; itís also a whole family-related issue.
  The importance of the womenís role in a family experiencing migration made me think of dealing with women as central figures. For this new Mexican immigration project, yet untitled, I want to have female performers wearing national flags. The location will be a former route from where the Spanish conquered Mexico. Iíll film the performance between two volcanoes in the Valley of Mexico, one of which, IztaccÌhuatl, is also know as the Mujer Dormida or the Sleeping Woman. There is a myth surrounding these two volcanoes (the other one is PopocatÈpetl): they symbolize grief and the eternal love between a man and a woman.

• H.H : Obviously, this covers issues far beyond the specific question of immigrant families. It should be extended to explore the question of all relationships, the human family. For your new exhibition in Seoul, Kimsooja: Archive of Mind, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul, you installed a huge oval table covered with clay balls that are made by the audience. Can you explain this project and its participatory aspect?

• K : Iíve been interested in clay and ceramics for a long time. My interest is more in the void that the vessels create, rather than the vessel itself. I was invited to participate in Water Event for Yoko Onoís solo show, LumiËre de líAube, at the MusÈe díart contemporain, Lyon, 2016; the Biennale de Lyon invited artists to create water containers. At the time, I was thinking about the clay ball as a Bottari, but also as the Earth, as a container. So rather than creating a void to contain water, I decided to make a clay ball as a pre-existing water container and address environmental issues. I sent a small clay ball that was still drying. Since then, I have been contemplating the formation of clay balls, how its creation has a psychological and meditative effect on the maker. When you make a clay ball you have to push your fingers and palms toward the center. A sphere is made by pushing from every point on the surface. Itís not easy to make a perfect sphere because you need to smooth every angle. The action of pushing opposing sides toward the center is similar to producing gravity within the sphere. To make the smoothest sphere, you roll the clay ball between your palms. Itís like a wrapping action, similar to making Bottari. This repetitive rolling action creates a spherical shape in your mind. I was working with my assistants with this clay and we reacted to it instinctively, enthusiastically touching it, rolling it. I found this instant reaction and concentration very interesting. It made me think that this project is not only for me to experience, but might even be more important for the viewers as participants. I decided to make an enormous communal table, bringing everyone together, sharing this experience at this elliptical wooden table, 62 feet (19 m) long. Each person has his or her space and time, but the work also creates a communal space, a communal society, working together toward a certain state of mind, creating a kind of cosmic landscape, a mind-galaxy.

• H.H : Like a field?

• K : Yes. I made the large table out of 68 smaller tables, which are made from irregular shapes to construct the elliptical geometric shapes. I also installed a sound piece, Unfolding Spheres (2016), with thirty-two speakers under the table, and a 16-channel soundtrack. One part is the sounds of the dried clay balls rolling, crushing, and touching, recorded with 4 or 5 different microphones. Because sound is only made when the ball touches an angled corner, it reveals the geometry of the clay ball. At the same time, it creates a cosmic sound: when the balls bang loudly, it produces a sound like a thunderstorm. I also made an audio performance, gargling with water in my throat, like a ìgrrrî sound. Sometimes it sounds like a stream, then it reveals more of the verticality of the rolling spheres, pushing air against gravity. It has a vertical force or movement, while the sound of the clay balls rolling reveals a horizontal axis. Iíve engaged in this vertical-horizontal structural relationship since the late 1970s. I also showed Structure ñ A Study on Body (1981); for this series of prints, I moved my arms at 90? to create geometric shapes, such as a triangle, circle, octagon, or square, to connect my body to the earth and the sky. I also included different colors to create different geometric shapes between my body and to determine the space around it. These prints directly connect to my sewn works, which have vertical-horizontal structures.

• H.H : You mentioned a cosmic sensation, the connection between the body and the world. I think one interesting aspect of this work is the relation between the body and architecture, highlighted through your use of light. For example, with your installations, Respirar ñ Una Mujer Espejo / To Breathe ñ A Mirror Woman, at the Palacio de Cristal, Madrid (2006), To Breathe: Bottari for the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2013), and now To Breathe (2016) in the exhibition at the MMCA, you have created beautiful environments with diffraction grating film applied to the windows. The light enters and creates a rainbow spectrum; it transforms the interior, giving it a cosmic feeling. On the other hand, in the Korean Pavilion there was an additional room, which was completely dark and silent. This is a fascinating contrast between the two aspects of cosmic existence. It seems to be a new dimension of your work developed in the last few years.

• K : In the MMCA courtyard I used the same film as in the Palacio Cristal and the Korean Pavilion. In a way, the painting or pigment was transmitted into light. This particular film has thousands of vertical and horizontal lines in every inch. It has a woven structure and functions like a prism, creating iridescent light when light passes through it. This is one of my investigations into the structure of painting, of canvas, and of color and pigment in relation to light. I created a completely dark and silent space, an anechoic room, to define the nature of light and sound. It was the opposite state of visualization, operating in connection with my questions of duality in both life and art. My questioning of dualityóthe vertical and horizontal structure of the canvasórelates to the psychological structures, the mandalas in our mind.
  My Masterís thesis was on the symbol of cross, from antiquity up to contemporary painting and sculpture. This cross and the horizontal-vertical structure are always present in art. Iím curious how it constantly reappears despite contemporary artís desire for creativity and innovation. Many artists reach this point, confronting this very basic structure: Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, Joseph Beuys, Antoni T‡pies, Lucio Fontana, Frank Stella, and many more. Iíve always questioned the inner structures of our world and our psychology. In my thesis I identified a relationship with psychological geometry of the Mandala, which utilizes cross structures and Carl Jungís archetypal phenomena theory. This isnít unrelated to my question of duality in art and life.
  When I was planning the Korean Pavilion, I experienced Hurricane Sandy in New York. I was living in complete darkness without any electricity for more than a week. I questioned the fear I had while walking in the dark in my building and on the streets, especially when someone is walking toward you. I realized that the fear occurs in our mind because of the ìunknownîóignorance of the Other. The unknown and the ignorance in the human mind were the questions I had at that time. Eventually, the relationship between light and darkness, sound and silence forming an architecture of bottari was what I created in the Korean Pavilion.

• H.H : This can be a perfect conclusion. Now we all live in a kind of darkness, and we need to find a way out, to create new light.

• K : Precisely.

• Visiting an exhibition preview can impede an uninhibited view at the art at hand, but in the event of a large-scale installation that opens to the invitees at a specific time, it can also have a magical shine, as if you enter and explore a shrine together. However, this heightened sense of wonder can only partly explain why I was overwhelmed by a wave of goose flesh, even before I fully set foot in Kimsooja's latest installation. That is the impact her art can have.

• Kimsooja's 'To Breathe' in Centre Pompidou Metz is a part of the 2015-2016 Korea-France Billateral Exchange, an event to celebrate 130 years diplomatic of relations between the two countries. The Korean artist, who lives and works in New York, Seoul and Paris, is known for her simple visual language and her deep humanism, a combination of core features, which led Olivia María Rubio to label her art as existential minimalism.

• In Metz she presents the next chapter in her To Breathe series. How to describe and assess an installation that immerses you instantaneous and do justice to its total experience? One immediately feels the limitations of language. It seems that the only way is to chop it into manageable components and in Kimsooja's case a possible path is to deal with these components in a chronological order.

• The oldest one is the recording of her humming and breathing. For her participation in the Lodz Biennale of 2004 she was inspired by her assigned location: a former weaving factory. The rhythmic and cyclic movement of a loom made her think of the inhaling and exhaling of the human body. In other words, in her sound performance she replaced mechanical movement with bodily motion and mechanical sound with human humming.

• The aural facet of her installation in Metz is similar to the one in Lodz. First we hear a skin-tingling humming. Then her soft nasal sounds develop into a polyphonic flirt on the edge of harmony and dissonance. They suddenly fade away and after a few silent seconds, we hear the artist breathing, from calm to agitated. It goes crescendo to a climax which we do not know the content of. Is it the angst of gasping for life or is it the rapture of la petite morte?

• The affective force of the soundscape is soothed by the second component of her installation: the slow projection of color fields on a floor screen. She first experimented with this in 2006, when she presented 'To Breathe / Respirare (Invisible Mirror, Invisible Needle)' at the Teatro la Fenice in Venice and the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris.

• The monochromes, more or less in the middle of the installation, are an oasis of serenity where the look can linger. They are surrounded by a sea of glittering mirrors that is bounded by the bay windows on both sides of the 80 meters long Gallery 2. The mirrors and the diffraction grid film on the windows are the more recent components in 'To Breathe'. In 2006 she transformed the Palacio de Cristal, a glass pavilion in the heart of the Buen Retiro Park in Madrid, with them.

• Whereas the film folds and blurs Metz's skyline and landmarks into a fairy-like rainbow spectrum, the mirror stickers unfold the space and the self. The ripples where they stick together and the reflection of the grid ceiling are dizzying and disorientating. Strolling while looking in the mirrors has a vertigo-like effect, but it also sharpens your sense of self-awareness. Something that was already ignited by the breathing.

• The abstraction of the alternating color projection, the virtuality of the mirrors and the reality of the cityscape and changing light melt together to an immersing experience that is as confronting as it is comforting. Here's an artist who is confident in her simple visual language and whose modest power is exposed to those who are open to it.

• Thomas Van Loocke : How difficult is it to create intimate art that can host a lot of visitors, like your installation in Metz? How do you feel about this tension?

• Kimsooja : I think all art can be intimate as long as the audience takes it as such. My breathing performance might be intimidating to some visitors, as it evokes a strong physical reaction because of its intimate, physical and sexual aspects. However, when you take it serious enough to go beyond those dimensions, you start to question the borderline between the moments of life and death.

• TVL : What are the best conditions to view and experience your installation? All alone or with a few or even a lot of others?

• K : All alone is interesting, but so is having someone else's presence, as the other's body serves as a measurement of scale to the installation. Even if there are several others, you can always be focused as long as you find an element to focus onto. At the moment, the number of visitors is limited to fifteen.

• TVL : In an earlier interview you said that "the whole of (your) practice has always been a journey of searching for a self-awareness". Do you think visitors can enter that state of mind when they're more and more preoccupied with their smartphones and shooting the most likeable Instagram photos?

• K : It is one of the symptoms of our contemporary technological society. Most people are not able to focus on the here and now. Instead of experiencing the now, they record it, so that they can replay it later. There's no corporeality and mindfulness to the time they spend. However, I was surprised to see many of the visitors very much engaging with the installation. Walking slowly, contemplating the moment. Visitors can experience whatever they want, as long as they don't do anything dangerous or disturb the others. I know you can't control your audience. The piece is there for the ones who are ready for and open to it.

• TVL : Regarding that lack of control and the ability to experience your spatial installations, how do you look back on your participation in the Venice Biennale of 2013? One reviewer noted that "the impact of the installation itself (was) far outweighed by the bureaucratic procedure one (had) to transition through".

• K : I agree that the opening period of the Biennale was not ideal to fully experience this particular piece. The Biennale attracts such a large number of visitors that we needed a procedure to ensure that everything ran as smooth as possible. Without it could have been dangerous for some people to enter the anechoic darkroom, just as walking on the mirror floor could have been for seniors or for people who suffer from vertigo. Although I am grateful for the enthusiasm and patience of the people who waited to experience both spaces in the Korean Pavilion, I still regret that we couldn't give more time in the anechoic chamber to the visitors. If I were able to recreate the piece, I think that more time would make it possible to delve deeper in one's inner space and to have a richer experience.

• TVL : Your work is based on displacement and humanness. What is your view on the biggest refugee and migration crisis since the Second World War?

• K : I personally think the Third World War is already happening. It was ignited by America's reaction to 9/11. In an endless cycle of violence, the whole world is now drenched in human blood. It threatens our freedom, sanity and daily life. We all have to witness this incessant violence, as mass media shows it non-stop in this era. It numbs us and makes us more and more indifferent, which is a huge problem. Contemplating our own individual problems will be the key to solve this, I think. We need to recover our heart, love and peace, now more than ever. The key is in our mind.
  Equally distressing is the unbelievable desperation of the refugees crossing oceans and borders. In this time we need art that can comfort and heal the human mind that has been hurt so much. We have to rethink how to lead our life and how to respect, embrace and share with the other, instead of arguing with or attacking him or her – to save ourselves, the others and the next generations and to save this globe.

• TVL : Are politicians tackling it in the right way? Do they show enough humanness in their approach?

• K : I am so disappointed by all measures taken by politicians in the name of the nation and humanity. What they do is exactly the same as what the ones they condemn are doing: killing. There's no better solution in history than Mahatma Ghandi's resistance, as there can be no excuse for taking someone's life. What are religious leaders teaching to their followers? Why can't we hear them speak up? What are influential thinkers doing nowadays? I was touched by the speech of the Princess of Jordan: she proposed to open her country for the huge number of refugees and to educate the immigrant kids. As she is one of the most powerful figures in Jordan, her words have a huge impact. I wished all nations showed this kind of courage, responsibility and humanity. Americans and Asians hesitate to act, as they think it is someone else's problem. Especially America should welcome refugees, given every citizen descends from immigrants all over the world.

• TVL : Has this crisis affected your work?

• K : My work has always been a response to violence and inhumanity and this will never change. I answer it by means of healing. Either by showing society's reality as a witness or by proposing a harmonious way of co-existence, questioning who we are and where we're going. I wish people find equilibrium and peace in my work that comes from their own empathy.
  As a child, I spent some important years near DMZ areas in South Korea, as my father served in the military. I came to realize lately that experiencing the specific geographical condition as well as the daily danger and DMZ border issues, must have given me a sensitive and vulnerable attitude to any kind of violence, be it verbal, visual or physical. Although my father was forced to serve during the Korean War and continued his responsibility until he retired as a general, he didn't believe in physical force and often showed anger over the military conduct towards civilians, especially the Gwangju massacre on May 21, 1980. I am sure the whole condition of my childhood has influenced my thoughts and my work a lot. Not only the environment in which we lived, but the education my parents gave me. There was love and care and they always emphasized and demonstrated the equality of every human being.
  As a teenager, I suffered a lot not being able to help people in need. I wished to quit high school and to become a social worker or labourer, as I was burdened by the thought that I was a privileged individual, although we were just a normal middle class family in Korean society. I chose to go to college, to be financially independent and to gain the strength to help others, while pursuing art as a tool for my contemplation on life and the world. My engagement with social issues in different forms is the basis of my art.

• TVL : What are your prospects?

• K : I'm doing extensive research for the last chapter of the Thread Routes, a film project that consists of six chapters, each one in a different location around the globe. I hope the political situation in Africa becomes stabilized so that I can travel more freely in the coming years to create it. This is the most important project on my mind right now.
  Another big plan is to find the right location for 'A Needle Woman – Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir', a 46-foot-taal needle-shaped sculpture in iridescent steel and polymer that I developed in collaboration with architect Jaeho Chong – my son – and Cornell University nano material engineer Ulirich Wiesner last year.

• 누구든지 김수자 작가가 제작한 작품들을 신속히 훑어보기로 한다면, 필자는 가장 손쉬운 방법으로 그의 작품들이 매체별로 정리된 웹 홈페이지 www.kimsooja.com로 일단 들어가 보라고 추천하고 싶다. 썩 잘 분류된 이 홈페이지는 작가의 글, 인터뷰, 작품에 대한 생생한 포트폴리오 역할을 하기 때문이다. 사실 필자도 여느 감상자들과 마찬가지이다. 김수자의 예외적인 전시들을 보기 위해 수시로 해외로 나갈 수는 없다. 그래서 빈번하게 이 사이트에 링크를 걸곤 한다. 그럼 그때마다 간화선(看話禪)의 화두 같은 작품들이 하나씩 하나씩 또렷이 드러나고, 이윽고는 일상에서 둔탁해진 의식의 벽이 얇은 필름처럼 예민해지는 묘한 기쁨을 느낀다.

• 김수자의 작품은 우리의 마른 감각에만 호소하지 않는다. 빠르고 격한 충격을 주거나 새뜻한 간질거림으로 자극하는 작품들과는 매우 다르다. 특이하게도 그의 작품들은 감상자의 몸과 의식을 동시에 사로잡고, 시각과 감성의 깊이(profondeur)를 파고든다. 그의 상상력과 정서도 그저 그렇고 그런 충동에서 비롯되지는 않는다. 그의 미적 상상력은 출렁이지 않고 고요히 가라앉은 마음과 여유로운 호흡으로부터 시작된다. 그래서 작품을 바라보는 우리도 너 나 없이 부지불식간에 방치해왔던 깊은 생각들 속으로 가라앉는다. '나'를 질문하게 하는 존재라는 것 혹은 세계 속 존재의 의미 내지 근원을 더듬어가는 사색의 느린 흐름을 타보는 경험을 하게 된다. 감상자들의 이 같은 특별한 경험을 배려하기 위함인지, 작가는 자신의 작품 안에서 스스로 목소리를 내세우지 않는 편이다. 작품을 설치하고서는 에고의 흔적을 지운 채 조용히 물러난다. 예술가가 주관과 감정을 표면에 드러내지 않음이 감상자에겐 흔치 않은 당혹스런 일이 되겠으나, 하지만 그렇기에 스스로 의식의 체험을 할 수 있는 넉넉한 사유의 자리를 얻음에야 ... 그러니 우리가 그의 작품 속으로 풍덩 빠져 볼만 하지 않겠는가.

• 천들을 바늘과 실로 꿰매어 연결한 1980년대의 <ㄱ, ㄴ, ㄷ, ㄹ> 연작과 <天, 地> 연작에서부터 최근의 비디오 설치작품인 <地水火風> 연작까지, 작가의 작품 구성은 미니멀리즘을 연상시킬 만큼 늘 단순하고 구조적이다. 초기작에서 수직선과 수평선 혹은 사선으로 이어진 사각형 천들은 조각조각마다 염색된 오방색들을 그대로 드러낸 채, 협화음과 불협화음의 색조 구성을 보여준다. <지수화풍>에서도 세계를 구성하는 4 요소들인 흙, 물, 불, 바람의 자연 이미지들을 순열로 연결해 설치함으로서, 존재를 둘러싼 세계의 근원적 의미를 네 방향을 따라 구조적으로 사유하도록 한다. 작가가 스펙터클의 축으로 등장한 <바늘여인> 연작에서도 마찬가지다. 그는 등을 돌린 채 얼굴을 보이지 않는 침묵 상태로 그렇게 '수직'으로 멈추어 서있다. 그 대신 주변 도시와 다양한 면모의 사람들이 형형색색의 천 조각들처럼 '수평'으로 그를 감싸 흐르고 움직인다. 2010년을 전후해 등장한 일련의 비디오 작품들인 <뭄바이: 빨래터>과 <앨범: 허드슨 길드> 그리고 <실의 궤적> 연작들 역시도 유사하게 이해할 수 있지 않을까 싶다. 보이지 않는 작가의 몸은 여전히 지구 곳곳을 수평으로 흐르는 갖가지의 존재의 삶들, 그 조각과 편린들을 끌어 모았다가 때가 되면 우리 눈앞에 보따리를 풀듯 펼쳐놓고 주목하도록 손짓한다.

• 그의 비디오 작품들은 그 전에 선행된 <보따리> 연작의 연장선 위에 있다. 초기에 천들을 아상블라주하듯 꿰맨 작품들은 평면작업이지만, 1991년 뉴욕 PS1 작업실에서 발견한 <보따리> 연작은 천들을 꿰매지 않고 천 조각 하나하나의 단위를 독립된 기표로 인식하면서 시작된다. 천 조각들은 색과 문양 그리고 크기에 상관없이 각각 하나의 기호가 되며, 전시장 바닥 혹은 테이블 위에 펼쳐놓는 산포의 기호로 유연하게 변화된다. 그러다가 작가가 어느 순간에 이 천 조각들을 끌어 모아 보따리로 싸면서, 평면 작업(수평 구조, 정지 상태)이 입체 작업(수직 구조, 이동 상태)으로 이행되고, 보따리는 신체와 함께 여행하는 오브제로 변환된다. 펼치고 싸는 다시 그 반대로도 전환되는 <보따리> 연작은 그 가변성과 이동성(유목성) 덕분에 시, 공간을 통한 작품 구조의 열림을 가져온 그야말로 현대미술의 획기적인 전환점으로 이해되는 것이다.

• 이후 작가는 세계 곳곳마다 보따리들을 들고 다니며 전시장마다 상이한 퍼포먼스를 펼쳐 보였다. 그리고 우리는 보따리를 열 때마다 존재와 삶의 다양한 상들을 풀어내는 작가의 행위에 매료되지 않을 수 없었다. 그런데 그는 여기서 멈추지 않고 다시 미술의 정체성이란 경계를 허물며 다른 영역으로 나아갔다. 새로운 출발점은 <보따리>의 무한한 구조적 가변성에 있었다. 그로부터 작가는 천 조각들 대신 비디오 영상 단편을 매재로 삼고 그리고 보따리를 펼치고 싸는 일 대신 필름을 편집해내는 일로 이행하며, 전혀 또 다른 이미지들을 펼쳐냈다. 필자는 비디오와 필름 영상의 선택이 그에게 어떤 변화를 가져왔는지 생각할 때마다, 감탄과 환호의 박수를 보내게 된다. 비단 작품 스케일과 구상에서 실현에 이르는 과정의 변화 뿐 아니라, 영상의 흐르는 시간성은 음양을 따라 오행하는 유동적 사태들 다시 말해 만물의 생성-변화-소멸의 변전을 근원적으로 설명해내는 최적의 방법적 조건을 마련해주었다고 생각한다. 들숨과 날숨의 호흡이나 실을 잣고 씨실, 날실을 직조하는 일 그리고 세계 곳곳에서 이어지는 실의 궤적과 남미, 유럽의 바늘 여인들의 이중 구조 역시 그의 비디오 작품에서는 존재-삶의 구조적 양태에 대한 직관의 이미지들로 살아났다.

• 호흡(숨쉬기)은 우리 삶의 시작과 끝이다. 첫 호흡으로 태어나며, 마지막 호흡으로 생을 마감한다. 이 보이지 않는 들숨, 날숨의 끝없는 반복은 우주의 보이지 않는 무한 에너지(氣, 光)의 맥동 그 자체이다. 다양한 삶들을 이루는 바탕이자 가장 근본적이고 통일된 존재 상징으로서 이 호흡을 김수자는 2006년 마드리드의 '크리스탈 궁전' 내부에 가득 채웠다(<호흡: 거울여인>). 이어 2013년 베니스 비엔날레에서도 <호흡하기: 보따리>란 설치작품을 통해, 전시장을 빛과 호흡으로 채웠다. 국내외 관객들에게 강한 인상을 던진 두 설치작품들은 비시각적인 빛과 호흡을 특수 필름과 거울을 사용해 눈부시도록 찬란한 무지개빛과 확대된 호흡 소리로 즉 심장의 수축과 확장, 씨실과 날실의 직조처럼 손에 잡힐 듯 생생한 촉각적, 청각적 맥동으로 전환시켰다. 그리하여 작가나 감상자의 존재/부재를 부각시키는 한편 생명과 환경의 연계에 더 주목하도록 하는 관계적 상황을 연출해냈다.

• A silent figure stands with its back facing the viewer, poised motionless against the ebb and flow of the anonymous crowd, unsheltered and without a want. Standing in front of A Needle Woman, a performance/video work (1999-2009) by the acclaimed artist Kimsooja, we see a body which, without doing anything, becomes a measure of time and space. As the artist's body weaves ceaselessly through the crowd, it shifts in and out of our field of vision. For a fleeting moment we experience our body transposed into hers, and through the borrowed gaze of the artist we confront our own impermanence in the face of time.

• Her most recent work, similarly titled, A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir, carries this experience forward in a new form of practice. It is the result of a close collaboration between Kimsooja, the nanoscientist Ulrich Wiesner, and myself, an architect, on the occasion of the Cornell University's inaugural art biennial organized by Stephanie Owens, director of the Cornell Council for the Arts. Sited at the heart of the university's Arts Quad, the 46 foot high 4.5 foot diameter custom-fabricated steel structure is fleshed out with transparent acrylic panels that have been individually coated in iridescent nanopolymer. Under a raking light, each of these panels transforms the entire pavilion into a radiant spectrum of color as the molecularly engineered 'block copolymer,' produced by Hiroaki Sai and Ferdinand Kohle from the Wiesner Group, refracts various wavelengths of light dependent on the angle from which it is viewed. The interior of the floor is mirrored, doubling and extending the sky into the ground.

• Cornell has a long history of commissioning site-specific art works. Perhaps those best known came out of the seminal 1969 Earth Art show curated by Willoughby Sharp, which brought together a group of young artists, including Hans Haacke, Richard Long, Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, and Günther Uecker, to produce new works on campus. Many of these artists treated the earth itself as a canvas and as sculptural material, just as today Kimsooja sees the earth as a "readyused" object – an idea akin to Duchamp's readymades, or Piero Manzoni's 1961 Socle Du Monde. In fact, much like Duchamp's attitude, Kimsooja's work resists human desire and adoration for visual pleasure, never making anything, but creating new thoughts for any given object or phenomenon. However, drawing such a formalistic relationship between the two artists in using found objects has its limits. For instance, the idea of the needle employed by Kimsooja, in her own words, is "a medium, a mystery, a reality, a hermaphrodite, a barometer, a moment, and Zen," which is much closer to a state of empathy than to a rationale of apathy. It echoes the spirit of Arte Povera, whose attitude, according to Germano Celant, is "intent upon retrieving the factual significance of the emerging meaning of human life."

• What then, led an artist who refuses to 'make' objects to conceive a 46-foot tall 'sculpture'? At the first meeting between the collaborators, Kimsooja was presented with a small vial containing an iridescent substance. Generally known as 'structural color,' and characterized by Ulrich Wiesner as 'block copolymer,' this chemically grown chain of monomers produce a continuous banding of molecules with light-refracting qualities similar to those found on the wings of butterflies or the shells of beetles. When examined under an electron microscope, it appears as a striated fabric. Needless to say, Kimsooja's sustained interest in used fabrics as a tableau of life finds another scale of reality here. Such a profound consistency between nanoscientific phenomena and her artistic practice allows her to work within an invisible realm outside the register of human senses and to bring reality closer to our own experience – a practice to which she has always been committed.

• "Interconnected to observations in art-making," she says, "nano-techniques are an inverse expression of our perspective of the universe (cosmology)." The former constantly sharpens our gaze towards a single point, infinitely dividing and redefining space almost to the point of eliminating interiority, while the latter moves toward the limits of exterior space, beyond geometric imagination. Architecture, whose purpose includes the preservation of interiority through geometry, frames this vast scope of space at a scale conducive to a direct bodily experience. To this end, the physical form of the pavilion has little relevance as a sculptural object, but rises out of a necessity of finding an instrument to bridge the visible and the invisible.

• The form of a needle is not without its own architectural history. The Egyptian obelisk, for example, functioned as a religious axis between man and the cosmos for many centuries. Some known as 'Cleopatra's Needle,' these sacred structures embody early Egyptian creation myths that explained the rising and setting of the sun – the solar cycle – through the metaphor of birth and consummation of life closely associated with solar deities, namely the sun god Ra. As such, light and time had already emerged as symbolic channels between man and celestial order in the shape of a needle.

• In effect, it is neither the nanomaterial, the architecture, nor the artistic intention that reveals the invisible, but the subtle yet perpetual cosmic motion reflected in the change of light. Material seizes such an instance. The molecular structure on the skin of the pavilion physically unwraps light, enabling a person's gaze to weave through the undulating depths of visual surface – a phenomenon perfectly mirroring the dynamic reciprocity between the standing figure and the gazing subject in the artist's video work. The 'needle,' in turn, anchored perpendicular to the ground, parallels our bodies and emerges as an object of non-violence. A stream of consciousness that once took the form of a brushstroke on the surface of a canvas is abstracted over the years in Kimsooja's practice as first a needle, then a body, a camera lens, and finally a luminous void. A gaze is all that remains.

• More than a symbol of, or a testament to, the confluence of art and science, A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir opens the ontological dimension between our fleeting existence and the cosmos by rendering all of our gaze – an emphatic gesture of human subjectivity – instrumental to the relational structure between distance, time, matter, and memory: a void at the tip of a needle point.

Abstract

• In this digital era of instant information and communication, a new level of cultural globalization has allowed disparate groups to come together, forming a familiar and shared culture. This idea of 'global harmony' is not suggestive of an idealized and naïve state of international utopia, but rather should be considered as a platform for increased understanding of shared human traits, states of being, conditions and emotions, which are ultimately, universal.

• Contemporary Korean artist, Kimsooja, is an embodiment of this concept of transcending boundaries, distinctions and limiting categories, as she is a true modern day global nomad. She is a multidisciplinary and multi-faceted artist, who, in fact, rejects prescriptive identity groups such as gender and marital status as well as socio-political, socio-economic, cultural and geographical identity constructs. Kimsooja's visual language may be rooted in Korean cultural traditions and mediums often associated with women and craft such as sewing, embroidery and textiles; however, she resolves to re-construct her identity and weaves herself into a global landscape. She achieves a delicate balance of leaving her mark as well as absorbing what is out there in the world, integrating into the fabric of different realities.

• This paper examines Kimsooja's selected conceptual works to understand how she critically overcomes the shadows and burdens of identity constraints. Kimsooja is able to ground herself to issues of real value and genuine stories that are concerned with the world, and artistic practices that uncover ideas that are neglected or overshadowed by the commercial gloss of the global art market. Furthermore, her body is neither the site of sexuality nor the fantasized/fetishized female body of the 1960s and 1970s Euro American Feminist context. Alternatively, her body can be seen as a needle weaving through disparate cultures, in an act of re-construction, unification and investigation of what it means to be a human being in the 21st century. As such, Kimsooja is an exemplary contemporary woman artist who strives to deliver her stance on true human equality and honesty, going back to basic story telling through highly sophisticated and intellectual visual mediums that nonetheless remain humble in its true intentions.

• "Without a needle, there would be no fabric, and without each individual, no fabric of society."

• In today's inter-connected contemporary context of hyper permeability and fluidity between disparate cultures, Kimsooja, can be seen as a multifaceted woman artist, a global citizen and a critical voice for humankind. She presents pressing and engaging works that touch upon the very essence of the human spirit and the physical body, particularly as it relates to and intersects with nature and the real world. Her works are existential and spiritual explorations of humankind's basic and fundamental relationship with the environment around them. Furthermore, her artistic practice investigates formal qualities and aesthetics, engaging in a unique method of story telling and creation. In addition, Kimsooja has an innate ability to balance oppositions and paradoxes in complementary and poetically sensitive ways, setting her apart as a contemporary artist of international caliber. Her works are empathetic and deeply concerned with humankind at large. As such, the decisive word for Kimsooja is transcendence. Ultimately, Kimsooja is the personification and embodiment of transcending boundaries as well as re-constructing identities beyond limiting categories or binaries, into a new type of cultural hybridity.

• In this paper, I will investigate how Kimsooja strikes an inherent balance of co-existences on multiple levels: firstly, in her early inquiries of form and aesthetics, and subsequently, in conceptual explorations of gender, nationality and identity. The latter ultimately results in dialogic awareness amongst humankind as well as the unity of the human spirit, the human body and nature. By weaving through these multifarious layers and demonstrating how they all function as variegated tools of expression, I will present the framework that grounds Kimsooja's presence as a modern day global nomadic artist, who speaks a language derived from her unique experiences, that resonates with all of humankind. I will be focusing mainly on Kimsooja's video series titled A Needle Woman, which was first done between 1999 and 2001, followed by a second set of works done in 2005, and a final iteration in 2009 in Paris, which was commissioned by La Nuit Blanche and projected onto the façade of the Hôtel de Ville, Paris. The reading of these works will be complemented with a number of other images including a late-19th century photograph and other historically significant images from the rich span of Korean art history. Kimsooja's modes of expression may have changed over the course of her artistic career; however, her core interest and concept of being a voice for humankind, a window into the human spirit and ultimately, a true modern day global nomad has always remained steadfast.

Kimsooja's early formal and aesthetic inquiries

• Kimsooja's works have evolved in a step-by-step process, with one artistic practice and aesthetic investigation resulting in another, providing critical building blocks for her oeuvre. Kimsooja's works were recently displayed in its chronological entirety for the first time at the Vancouver Art Gallery's exhibition Kimsooja Unfolding (October 2013 – January 2014). This survey exhibition displayed her work with 3 specific foci: her interest in time, memory and displacement; the relationship between the human body and the physical, material world; and last but not least, her engagement with the expressive and conceptual qualities of colour, light and form.

• Kimsooja studied Western painting at the prestigious Hong-Ik University in Seoul, and her origin as a painter was a crucial starting point for the development of her art. Beginning her professional career in the 1980s, Kimsooja had a heightened level of consciousness about the concept of tableau. From the very onset, she was interested in the intersection of art and life, as for her, art was not a paradigm disconnected from real life – not just her own life but also the world around her. In fact, Kimsooja was inspired by her childhood experiences as a young girl sewing bedcovers with her mother, which brought about the revelation of unity between her thoughts, sensitivity and activity, forming her artistic tenet. Her early aesthetic investigations in formative works such as The Earth and the Heaven (Plate 1) allowed for varied expressive formats that followed the legacy of abstract expressionist style painting, collage and the ready-made, or 'ready-used' as she calls them. The use of textiles and the act of sewing were not so much a demonstration of a feminist, activist standpoint, as it may at first seem, but rather, as the artist states, "the engagement with methodologies based on female domestic labour was more about avant-garde action in relation to contemporary painting and the concept of tableau," following in the tradition of modernist inquiry.

• Having rationalized the needle as the tool that breaks through the surface of the 'canvas' or piece of cloth, Kimsooja was able to penetrate the barrier that separated art from life. As Suh Young-Hee elaborates, having punctured the surface of pictorial art of the preceding centuries, like Lucio Fontana, who slashed his monochromatic canvases, Kimsooja is no longer bound to the two-dimensional screen of illusion but rather, engaged in a process of creating three-dimensional as well as four-dimensional structures that her 'needle' passes through and conjoins. As the act of sewing intertwines art and life, a renewed reality and experience is forged for the artist. Therefore, the fabric and the act of sewing become the forms to which Kimsooja expresses the world of human beings like herself. A pivotal moment for Kimsooja was her 1992-1993 residency in New York City at MoMA PS1, where she was roused to re-assign meaning to used traditional Korean bedcovers as a ready-used aesthetic formation. At this time, being away from her native land, Kimsooja conceived of her iconic bottari (Plate 2), which aggregates a wrapped two-dimensional 'tableau' into a three-dimensional sculptural form through the act of filling the tableau up with used clothes and tying a knot to unite the contents together. As such, this action of wrapping bodies and memories was seen as a true formalistic and aesthetic statement that provided a breakthrough for Kimsooja's artistic practice.

• Kimsooja's early inquiry into form and fashioning new methods of expression is similar to the pioneers of Korean modern art, the forefathers of Monochrome art. These artists in the 1970s pursued new modes of expression that were connected to their personal experiences, contemplating the exigency of a Korean modernism. Kimsooja marks a significant presence in this continuum of Korean art history as she is carving out another mode of artistic expression. The Monochrome artists, however, were trying to define a Korean identity solely in the realm of modern painting. To take an example, Monochrome artist, Ha Chong-hyun was concerned with the materials' physical qualities (Plate 3), as he pushed pigment back and forth between the linen, until the paint and the surface became intermeshed, breaking the distinction between material and surface. In contrast, moving far beyond the confines of Monochrome artists' contemplations on the 'surface,' Kimsooja is not merely concerned with material and form. For her, it is more about using her newfound relationship with artistic creation and renewed engagement with formalistic structures and aesthetic qualities as a tool for expression. This unique mode of expression for Kimsooja allows her to pursue art-making that is closely intermeshed with real life; there is no separation between the two dimensions.

• Moreover, as her artistic career has evolved beyond the three-dimensional structure into video, installation and performance, Kimsooja's role as an artist has further sophisticated. Her performances are on the complete opposite spectrum to the often violent, sexually charged performances of Marina Abramovic and Lee Bul (Plate 4) where the female body is the site of exploitation and extreme forms of expression. Rather, Kimsooja emphasizes "inverting the notion of an artist as a predominant actor through 'non-doing' and 'non-making' in order to reveal a critical point that is without heroism and without violent action or aggression." In other words, art-making has become a meditative journey for Kimsooja; through the repetitive voyage of the needle piercing through material surfaces and her body as a metaphorical needle weaving through different environments, Kimsooja achieves an absolute sense of self-awareness. This philosophy of course is tied to Zen Buddhism and Eastern philosophies with the practice of meditation as an act of emptying oneself, resulting in a connection between the mind, body and soul, to ultimately attain enlightenment. In fact, Kimsooja describes A Needle Woman series to be a critical, transformative experience when she transitioned from a vulnerable state of mind to a focused, meditative and enlightened state of mind. In this way, Kimsooja's works focus on the process and act of art-making rather than the end result, as well as subjective experience rather than objective articulation.

• Therefore, in Kimsooja's art, the physical, material and spiritual dimensions coincide, while co-existence of creation and non-creation, of doing and non-doing is also prevalent. Kimsooja transcends the essentialized inquiries in formalistic qualities that are only concerned with art in its singular dimension and purpose. Instead, utilizing her diversified artistic methods of exploring form and aesthetics as a way to move into greater self-awareness, she connects her mind, body and soul with the outer world in order to understand what it means to be truly human. Moreover, she is in sync with the many different human realities as well as the 'conditions of humanity' she encounters through her artistic journeys as a Needle Woman across 14 cities, which results in acute contemplations on the differences in ethnicities, geography, economics and cultural, religious, political tensions.

Cultural and gender-specific roots of Kimsooja's nomadic existence

• At the core, Kimsooja moves beyond traditional epistemology, transcending familiar and expected categorizations. Kimsooja's ontological manifestation is explicated in her one-word name, without distinction between surname and given name, which as she declares, becomes an anarchist's name. This defiant act of changing her name to be one entity is symbolic of her rejecting gender, marital status, socio-political, socio-economic, cultural and geographical identity constructs. Her discord with categories allows her existence to be free, moving seamlessly through time, place and ideas. However, aesthetically there are clear connections to her being a woman and a Korean native.

• When examining Kimsooja's oeuvre there are unavoidable implications and associations with regards to gender. Encounter – Looking into Sewing (Plate 5) is an appropriate segue into this discussion of her role as a woman artist. This arresting photograph suggests a woman's figure completely veiled by multiple layers of traditional bedcovers, capturing the multi-layered complexity of the female identity, not only questioning its societal construct but also moving beyond conventional gender paradigms. The female figure hinted by the gomusin shrouded by cloths represents tradition, signifying the weight of Confucian values that to varying extents still govern gender roles in Korean society today. Yet the gomusin is taking a step forward, seemingly an allusion to the position of women today striving to re-define their status and position at large. At this point, we can compare Kimsooja's photograph with a late-Choson dynasty photograph (Plate 6) of a young Korean woman in street costume. Not so different from the burka, in late-19th century Korea, women were expected to cover their body and head in public as a sign of propriety. The incredibly similar form of the cloths engulfing the female figure insinuates gender politics, gender roles in society and issues concerned with women's rights.

• However, Kimsooja consciously chooses to disassociate with the confines of 'feminism,' even despite the changing landscape of global feminisms, a sub-domain of global contemporary art today. She clearly states that she is neither operating within the traditions of the feminist movement nor within the practices of performance artists who use their body as sites of sexuality and violence in staged performances or grotesque actions. We can read her bottari works (Plate 2) in particular, as art for women by women, in the sense that these textiles and the act of sewing, as well as the tradition of wrapping bottaris, are historically, functionally and aesthetically associated with women. These works inevitably bring about questions of women's position in society, simultaneously underscoring the important role of women in the family domain, perhaps also intimating their conditions as alienated housewives.

• Admittedly, Kimsooja recounts that though she had been predominantly influenced by the avant-garde aesthetic engagements in New York City, which inspired the formation of the bottari, that in actual fact, upon return to Korea, she came to a critical realization of Korean society and Korean women's role bundled up in her formerly-mere aesthetic 'ready-used' object. Notably, it was after this grounding to socio-cultural issues and awareness of the real world that further evolved Kimsooja's bottari works to a critical level, as it is seen as a site of intersection of the physical body, Kimsooja's own conditions as a woman as well as Korean women at large, and further, human destiny. Therefore, she moved on to wrap the bottari with used clothing, as a way of reinforcing fragments of reality in her 'ready-used' object. It is important to acknowledge Kimsooja's feminine sensibilities and recognize that these visual motifs associated with the female gender are tools for expression. Furthermore, although her contribution to visual culture is as a woman artist, she is ultimately interested in the physical and spiritual interactions with nature and the realm of human reality, which transcends gender identity and constructs. Her art is a phenomenological experience for both herself and the audience, rooted in a feminine aesthetic.

• As always, Kimsooja mediates between polarizing movements or philosophies. She has married the interest in form and problematic of art-making with a spiritual dimension – art becoming more of an 'experience,' for both herself and her audiences. Her solid foundation and higher consciousness and sensitivity to perceiving the intricate connection between the human body, spirit and the earth allows her to move into the realm of existentialism. In A Needle Woman, we are able to understand how harmony, balance and unity is achieved between the human body, spirit and nature.

• Although Kimsooja's aesthetics are based on feminine sensibilities and rooted in Korean cultural traditions, she is neither celebrating individuality nor predominantly on a quest to discover her 'inner-self,' articulating her unique 'identity.' Instead, Kimsooja's visual roots become tools for expression, as well as points of entry into her narrative. What becomes the universal appeal and deeper criticality of Kimsooja's work is the fact that through her meditative approach to art-making, she provides an engaging platform that becomes a window to humanity. Her work is a universal lens to perceive the human spirit and to have awareness of the modern day conditions of being a human being.

Transcending boundaries

• Fundamentally, Kimsooja goes back to the core of human existence. Her work transcends its singular purpose as an aesthetic object, in order to enhance our understanding of our position in the world. She provides us with insight as to how art is sincerely intertwined with our own existence and experience of the world. Kimsooja, therefore, provides a platform for critical dialogue related to identities in a globalized world. No doubt her work emerges from a Korean cultural context, yet again, her work transcends a singular, local context having a much broader impact to a global audience. In other words, Kimsooja's art is all about human expression and basic human emotions that knows no boundaries.

• In a work that deals with globalization at the core – A Needle Woman (Plate 7) – Kimsooja places herself in 15 different cities around the world over the course of 10 years. Her body and physical presence is the constant in these works, as she blends in or sticks out of the crowd. She describes herself as a needle that weaves through the different cities and experiences the diversity, building a tapestry of global inter-connectedness. She becomes either an expression of the all-too-familiar global citizen or a stranger/foreigner who does not belong. While presenting this contradiction, she also desires to reconcile "perfect immobility and perpetual motion," wanting to exist simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. This notion is a fundamental questioning of existence and identity in globalization. Through her works, the social identities of people in the different locations can be examined, as people go about their daily existence, responding to the artist's body in vastly different ways. Concurrently, her own identity is questioned as she simultaneously embodies and rejects her indigenous culture, constantly altering and blending into the global, social fabric. Kimsooja is influenced by her Korean roots, yet she takes these elements of culture to befit her patchwork identity, her skin wrapping and re-wrapping her body, just like a bottari, as it passes through the world.

• In A Needle Woman, Tokyo (Plate 8), the movement and the pace at which people are passing by is entirely unsettling, chaotic, disruptive and jarring for the audience. The endless crowd walks in front of the camera lens, while the chaos of traffic and lights of the ambulance murmur past in the distance, unfocused. Although the people walking by constantly change, and individuals only stay in the focus of the camera lens for a split second, the viewer cannot help but feel the monotony of the crowd. There is no individual within this mass. It quickly becomes exhausting to look at, our eyes become tired and restless. All the while, Kimsooja remains still, meditative in the hectic chaos, where people are barely stopping and noticing her presence. Kimsooja's presence becomes the constant, her long black hair flowing down her back, creating a perfect symmetry to her body. Her presence intersects the flow of people and the entire experience. She remains inconspicuous in her monk-like attire, not ostentatious, yet she is also highly conspicuous – the only stillness in the constant movement.

• Complementing this Tokyo work is A Needle Woman, Kitakyushu (Plate 9), which has Kimsooja lying horizontally on a rock formation. In stark contrast, to the hustle and bustle of a great metropolis, here, Kimsooja is becoming one with nature. The distinction between her body and the natural environment begin to merge as the video progresses in stillness and silence. We begin to look beyond the specific shapes of her body's contour laying on the rock, and in turn, we begin to see the unity between the body, the rock and the sky, as our spirit connects with this specific time and place on a contemplative level. Kimsooja states that the most important thing to arise out of these performances is her own experience of 'self' and awareness as a process, rather than the video as a result.

• In 2005, Kimsooja continued her video works in A Needle Woman series in 6 new cities. In complete contrast to her presence in the bustling streets of Tokyo, the public reaction in Havana (Plate 10) is vastly different. These second set of video works had been deliberately slowed down so that the passersby's interactions with her body could be accentuated. When the video begins the first thing we notice is an elderly man standing right in front of Kimsooja, trying humorously to illicit a response from her, while another man stands on the right corner of the frame, staring from a safe distance for a prolonged period of time. Throughout the work, the people strolling by all slow down to take a look and there is a general sense of reaction to Kimsooja's presence. As such, this then becomes a sociological experiment, providing insight into the cultural differences between Cubans and Japanese, to say the very least.

• Kimsooja desires to be "like a needle that leaves no mark," connecting two pieces of cloth, two continents or states of consciousness. Kimsooja's openness to the world is what makes her a global, nomadic artist, embodying a hybrid identity. She weaves seamlessly through different cultures, leaving her mark but more importantly absorbing what is out there. Synchronously, she is mesmerized by the sense of unity felt through this act of sewing and weaving, as she equates it to a process of emptying and connecting with the inner self. In A Needle Woman, this process of weaving is like a continuous act of repetition, which becomes a form of meditation and contemplation. The greater function and purpose of Kimsooja's art is for us to question what it actually means to be human. The power of her art is that the different layers in her work stimulate thought and engage the mind, to cultivate "mindfulness of what human beings encounter by virtue of being human," similar to the goal of meditation practice.

Conclusion

• Kimsooja challenges societal as well as art historical constructs and categories, operating as a free-agent of change. It is through her practice, modus operandi and philosophy that a new epistemology of contemporary art takes place, as she escapes from being pinned down to any movement, style, or group of artistic practice. Kimsooja has created a unique language of expression, fusing her deep-rooted cultural influences with her feminine sensibility, filtering through her personal history and communicating her innate empathy towards humankind and the greater human spirit. Her art opens us up to see the world from totally unexpected perspectives, as she herself truly feels with her body, transcending the artistic medium, the actual performance as well as the time and place to sensuously experience the world around her.

• There is already so much conflict, negativity, criticism and problems in the world; in Kimsooja's works, her belief is apparent that there does not need to be anymore negative energy expended on inculpating existing systems. Instead of focusing on the failures and injustices, she does what is most human, she feels great empathy for humankind, her art being a heartfelt gesture of reaching out to the common human spirit that we all share. She engages with matters, issues and state of realities in the most basic human way, opening her heart, which in turn, inspires us to open our hearts, to come to a common, shared understanding and experience of the world. Her works re-discover what has always existed in nature but that has never really been 'found,' as she goes beyond painting methodology to "[reveal] visual realities in nature that have always been there." To conclude, Kimsooja desires art to be the world fine-tuned to make us conscious of place – "our place, the place of others and the place of art, arising in the interstices of culture."

• A fundamental presence in much of Kimsooja's work is that of the body. Over decades of production, beginning with the sewn works of the eighties, in which the body was merely implied through the presence of cloth, followed by the bottari works of the nineties that served as metaphors for intimate coverings of the body, to her canonical video works recording the artist's bold physical presence in the world and some of her most recent works implicating the human presence of others, the body has been one of the underpinnings of an artistic practice that addresses large issues of our time—primarily, how we relate as human beings, and the physical/spiritual/social nature of such relations. After all, it is through the body that we perceive and act in the world, and it is also through our bodies, as viewers of Kimsooja's work, that we come to gain a perspective on her ideas. The following dialogue with the artist focuses on four points of entry into to the performative aspects of her work: body, place, time and participation.

• Daina Augaitis : One of your earliest works, Structure – A Study on Body (1981), is a set of prints that explores the idea of a universal body—but in this case you were already, as a young artist in 1981, inserting the specificities of your own subjective body into your work, as if to counter a universal stereotype. Can you describe the impetus for making this work?

• Kimsooja : After graduating from college in 1980, I continued investigating questions of tableau as a place in which painters spend their lives trying to find their own mirror. I especially focused on its woven horizontal and vertical system—and with this, the structure of the world and the universe at large. I valued this cruciform structure as a means for understanding the inner structure of aesthetics and human psychology, and it also gave me a perspective from which to approach natural phenomena. This also led to my master's thesis: "A Study on the Universality and Hereditariness of the Plastic Sign: A Focus on the Cruciform Sign" (1984). It was an investigation of the transcendent examples of ancient archetypes through to modern and contemporary painting and sculpture in relation to anthropological and psychological aspects. For example, my enthusiasm for Korean culture at that time extended to the Korean alphabets that were constructed by three symbolic Taoist elements: earth (horizontal line), sky (vertical line) and the human being (dot), a system invented by King Sejong of the Joseon dynasty in the fifteenth century that has an intrinsic horizontality and verticality. I've been focusing totally on this cruciform structure in Korean architecture, furniture, objects and alphabets—even in traditional garments and human psychology—as a basis for understanding the world. During my first trip to Japan in the late 1970s, I came to recognize the uniqueness of Korean visual culture in terms of its own sensibility of colour, especially in relation to Japanese, Chinese and other Asian cultures, which I had previously thought had greater similarities. This interest then expanded to include the body as a tool for the formal examination of horizontal and vertical structures, in a way that is similar to how it is incorporated in our alphabet. My intention in these performative prints was to explore my body within a circular framework as a geometric axis, using images of my arms, hands and legs stretched and folded in various poses to create spatial dimensions that were highlighted with different colour tones. Leonardo da Vinci created a certain universal stereotype in his Vitruvian Man, but for me it was less about proportion than about the dimensionality of the space extended into the world through the cross-like structures of my own body. That was the starting point for this project, which ended up as a series of serigraph prints. It was only a few years later that I escaped from Christianity/Catholicism, and while I won't disagree that I have had a psychological association with cruciform shapes in the artistic domain, that was not the motivation behind exploring the cross shape in my sewn work.

• DA : You were conscious of the specificities of your culture and exploring those, but what about the specificity of gender? Were you consciously making work as a female? What was the situation for women in Seoul in the eighties?

• K : When I was young I understood the position of women in our society to a limited degree, but I became much more aware of it after I married in 1983, when the different roles and positions of women in the family and in society became clearer to me and I began to explore identity issues. However, I looked at my own culture through completely different eyes when I returned to Seoul at the end of 1993 from New York (after finishing a one-year residency at PS1), a place where many different roles, ethnicities, cultures and value systems were in action.
  At times I am conscious that I am a female when it comes to domestic daily-life relationships, and in a political sense, but not as much in art-making, even though I realize I implicate the traditional female domain by using tools like the needle and activities like sewing. However, I believe these elements have evolved conceptually beyond contexts of femininity. It's not that I wish to emphasize my gender, but I am simply not a man, and I can't make my titles A Needle Man or A Mirror Man or A Beggar Man. I started a "sewing" practice in the early eighties neither as a female artist nor as a female specifically interested in sewing nor as someone who was particularly good at sewing. Rather, I was questioning the surface of the tableau and measuring its bodily and psychological depth, binding myself to it (the other) and taking it as a mirror with which to reflect myself, which was also a healing process for me and for others. I discovered experimental artistic value in women's domestic labour—especially in Korea, where female and male labour were clearly separated until the late nineties. Even now, tasks such as cleaning the house, doing laundry, cooking, decorating the home, shopping and educating children are divided along gender lines, although the younger generation has become more open to sharing domestic responsibilities and there are more female professionals in Korean society in recent years. In the late nineties I was compelled to refer to the context of women's labour in performative painting, sculpture and installation. And the discovery of the bottari (Korean word for "bundle") as a form of tableau—a sculpture and a "ready-used" object—made me continue to extend this notion of women's "labour" in contemporary art practice. I was increasingly engaged with my symbolic works made from bedcover fabrics, which had a parallel meaning in my personal life after I got married. It is not unrelated to the cultural and ethical position or expectations that Korean women have in our society. Nevertheless, I never wished my practice to demonstrate a feminist or an activist position, although I certainly accept my own femininity and the strong feminine aspect of my work. More importantly, I believe in a basis of humanity, and while feminism stands alongside humanism, I am less interested in gender-oriented power struggles. In hindsight, I still think my engagement with methodologies based on female domestic labour was more about avant-garde action in relation to contemporary painting and the concept of tableau.
  The short period I spent in New York was instrumental, because that's when I discovered a new meaning in the used traditional Korean bedcovers of newly married couples as a ready-made/ready-used aesthetic formation. By wrapping fragments of used traditional clothing in these colourful bedcovers, the bottari constituted a wrapped two-dimensional "tableau" that had been transformed into a three-dimensional sculpture simply by tying one knot and encasing all the contents, as if hugging them all inwardly or being pregnant. It is an action of wrapping bodies and memories. While I was in New York, these bottari objects were a formalistic and aesthetic statement, but when I returned to Korea, I saw our society and women's roles in it from a more critical perspective, and the bottari was no longer just an aesthetic object. Rather, it became tied to notions of the body, to my own conditions and to those of women in general in Korean society, and also to human destiny in a broader sense. After that, I no longer used fragments of coloured fabrics inside of the bottari as a way of creating a type of "pigment." Instead, I began to wrap used clothing in its entirety in order to emphasize elements of reality.

• DA : When you're using fabric and clothing as the material for many of your works, it implies an absent body. As you think back on these early works, what body were you referring to? Is it your body? Is it a metaphorical body of society?

• K : Looking back at my earlier practice, it seems interesting that I've been so focused on associating fabric and clothing with the skin and the body; even now I realize how much I've been conscious of its presence and connotation. The question began with the conditions of my own body, but I must say it was translated and transformed into somebody else's and then, ultimately, into an anonymous body. I try to use my body more objectively than subjectively and don't wish to make it about personal revelation.

• DA : Thinking about when you began to make bottari in New York, could you further describe the implication of the memory of their previous owners?

• K : I had been making large sewn pieces since 1983, stitching square- or rectangleshaped parts of used clothes together into a flexible and not pre-determined "canvas." A few of them were cross-shaped—which of course can be a reference to a body or have a religious connotation—while others were triangular or irregularly shaped, based on verticality and horizontality. I started with the old clothes of my grandmother and then I used anonymous people's clothing. At that time, I worked mostly with traditional clothing not only because I was fascinated with the nature of the fabric, but also because the practices of Korean daily life were very much ruled by tradition—that is to say, by Confucianism, which created a strong hierarchy in domestic life and in our society. However, this was also one of the reasons that non-verbalized suppression and contradictions were present in our society. I was never actively engaged with feminism or with any particular groups or isms in my private life or in my art. It was my goal to maintain an independent stance while pursuing a sense of totality in my practice. What happened was that these social concerns merged with my existential and aesthetic problems.
  After 1990, I moved away from the square shapes and made irregularly assembled forms with the same materials on a larger scale, which brought a more open dimension to my work. My last sewn piece made at PS1, Towards the Flower (1992), is a large, sewn assemblage wall piece consisting of a long pole wrapped with reused bedcovers and scraps of clothing leaning against the tableau together with my first wrapped bottari as another component. The piece combines three elements: the wall tableau as a painting; the pole leaning onto the painting, which replaces my (or the audience's) hand and gaze and is an extended body; and the first bottari I had made as a sculpture that enfolds and wraps up all the sewn pieces I had made in the past. In the end, the bottari seemed to encapsulate everything inside of it and became a complex symbol. I didn't make any more sewn pieces after that.

• DA : How did you make the transition from the bottari works to the video works in which you begin to use your own body as subject matter?

• K : My first video was actually intended as a documentary film of my methodical working process with the bedcovers at a chosen site in Oksanseowon Valley in Kyungju. There I laid the bedcovers out on the ground like a field of laundry and then slowly collected them in my arms and wrapped them into bottari. The film shows every single step and interaction with these flexible fabrics (or "canvases"). At the end, I wrapped everything into two bottari and carried them away. When I was reviewing the footage, I immediately noticed that my body walking on the fabric signified a symbolic needle and I furthermore discovered that the camera's lens and the video's frame served as another form of immaterial framing within the screen. The video thus became a wrapping of the wrapping. The juxtaposition of such opposites—the physicality of the bottari, which evokes a body, together with the video frame as another immaterial way of wrapping—has been a component of my work ever since.

• DA : As you began to move into this field of performance centred on your own living body as an essential aspect of the work were you thinking at all about some of the experiments of Valie Export, Marina Abramović or Yoko Ono? Were you interested in the history of performance art as you began to use your own body?

• K : I had only seen a few historical performance images, but I was not interested at all in the staged performances or violent actions of Western performers. Instead I wished to interact directly with nature or in the realm in which real life occurs—not to show something to the audience, but rather to offer an experience for both the audience and myself… In 1979, while I was still at art school, there was an "event" as part of the Daegu Contemporary Art Festival that I was invited to be a part of. It was an interactive "Two-Person Event" organized by Kim Yong-Min for which we ravelled from Seoul to the Gangjeong riverside in Daegu. We wore identical orange workers' vests and departed from the Seoul train station for Daegu, my home town. We took notes on the journey (mainly done by Kim Yong-Min) and each one of us collected preferred objects along the river that were installed in two small adjacent spaces with primitive walls constructed from gathered branches. I collected small objects, such as stones, small piles of sand, little tree branches, flowers, a tiny soju (Korean sake) glass, fresh garlic cloves, etc. I placed the garlic and the soju glass on top of a small installation of branches and leaves atop a tiny sand dune, as if it were a small shrine offering in a shamanistic ceremony. Each of us hung our clothes on the wall and left our travel notes that recorded the entire journey from the train station in Seoul to the Gangjeong riverside and the exhibition space in Daegu. This journey together was unplanned, and was guided completely by each of our individual desires. I realized then that this raw energy of daily life would become the essence of my performances. I wanted to establish a totally different way of doing performances by inverting the notion of an artist as a predominant actor through "non-doing" and "nonmaking" in order to reveal a critical point that is without heroism and without violent action or aggression. I was quite vulnerable and disturbed by the violent performance actions of some performance artists in relation to their own bodies or those of others. I've always questioned a violent exploitation of the body, as it is something I am completely against, even if it is intended to demonstrate the infliction of violence upon the body. I have always believed that there is a way to demonstrate critical ideas without being aggressive.

Place

• DA : Your earliest performance-based works occurred when you began to travel with the bottari works in the mid nineties. Was this to explore different places as a way of locating specific contexts and histories that would emerge out of them?

• K : I was inspired by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru's exhibition Cities on the Move, a project in which I participated. When I was young, my family was always moving from one city or village to another due to my father's job. I often enjoyed playing with my school friends in my teenage years by writing down all the names of the cities and villages in which I had lived, connecting them to one another with lines like long sewn stitches in between the names of the towns. The title of Cities on the Move reminded me of our family's nomadic life and inspired me to do the Cities on the Move – 2727 Kilometers Bottari Truck (1997) performance, revisiting all of the villages and cities of my youth in an eleven-day trip across Korea.

• DA : By now you have worked in a vast number of cities throughout Asia and around the world. What are your thoughts about the idea of place now? Are you using those locations as a way to root your experience in them? How do you choose where you'll be going?

• K : When I chose Tokyo as the location for the first performance of A Needle Woman (1999), I only had the idea that I would do a performance piece in the city followed by one in nature, without any more specific plans. Clearly, I didn't want to be an actor on stage, and it was a new challenge for me to pursue this experience as an anonymous performer. This work was intended as the first performance piece that I would record and show to the public, working together with the CCA Kitakyushu. I follow my instinct in terms of the energy that I feel from a place—it is an energy that has a lot to do with either people or nature. I often choose the place intuitively, otherwise I am not inspired and can't perform.
  In order to experience my body defined by different realities, the enlightening experience in Shibuya of standing solitarily in the middle of humanity was followed by the opposite axis of standing with a performance of lying horizontally in solitude in nature.

• DA : When you work in different locations, does your work change? And how do you intersect with the social, cultural, political and economic dimensions of each place?

• K : I had an incredible experience performing in Tokyo. The performance started the moment in which I became aware of my body in an extreme state of conflict in the middle of a big crowd. I couldn't walk anymore and just had to stop right there and be still in order to tame the inner scream building in my body from the energy of all the people around me. As it became more and more extreme it felt as if I were getting wrapped up inside my own body like a bundle—an absolute sense of self-awareness. That's how the performances of A Needle Woman (1999–2001, 2005, 2009) began. While I was standing still and remaining centred, I experienced an incredible transition in my mind from vulnerability to a focused, meditative and enlightened state of mind. This is when my mind and eyes entered the reality of a large universe, seeing the white light beyond the horizon of the waves of people coming and going. This powerful experience of enlightenment enabled me to meet the people of the world's most crowded cities. For the first series of A Needle Woman performances, I chose the most populated locations in the world in order to meet oceans of people—Shanghai, Delhi, Cairo, New York, Mexico City, London and Lagos, all metropolises on different continents.

• DA : When you arrived in these cities did you think in advance about what the politics of each place were?

• K : Before this work, I hadn't witnessed the conflicts, violence or poverty that exist around the world. But after visiting Delhi, Lagos and Cairo, those places really made me reconsider differences in ethnicities, geography, cultural and religious tensions, politics and economics. When I finished all eight cities in the series in 2001, I realized how problematic the entire world had become. The more I travel,the more challenging and violent the world seems. Eventually, for the 2005 Venice Biennale I decided to create another series of A Needle Woman performances dedicated to cities in conflict, whether this was economic, ethnic, religious, violent or post-colonial in nature. The condition of humanity in each place and my growing inner awareness intersect, leading to deeper and broader questions.

• DA : Do you work with local people? And is community collaboration important? It seems that the notion of collaboration has evolved in your work.

• K : Actually, I'm not big on collaborating with large groups; I almost have a fear of it. I prefer one-on-one relationships rather than group relationships. But I am getting more involved in collaborative work, and it does offer me valuable experiences. Recent collaborations with communities include working on An Album: Hudson Guild (2009), for which I collaborated with the Hudson Guild Senior Center. Another example is my most recent ongoing film project, Thread Routes (2010–), which focuses on specific weaving communities around the world. In these works I am now physically removed from the viewers, but through my gaze, I explore my perspective through the specific communities that perform their passions, desires and rituals. In Thread Routes these are captured in their textile-related performances, implicating local environmental conditions and the aesthetics of movement that unfold in the actions of their bodies. It goes back to my earlier work displaying an interest in sewing, spinning, wrapping and unwrapping. In a sense, I unwrap their bodies and minds, creating drawings of their movements and life. I feel the psychological dimensions of our bodies are demonstrated when they are unfolding in a performative state.

Time

• DA : The passage of time is a significant aspect of your work. How do you think about time and impermanence in relation to your work?

• K : I believe not in permanency but in constant transition. Everything is in process and is ephemeral, including my own body. In my earlier works the process of sewing was a journey to the past, present and future, as an internal voyage through space and time. The performance of A Needle Woman afforded me the awakening experience of an internal journey by locating/dislocating the physicality of my own body, which in turn posed questions and suggested different perceptions of time in both my mind and that of the viewer. Yet another special state of perception occurred in A Laundry Woman – Yamuna River, India (2000), the performance in which I was standing on the bank of the Yamuna River. At one point I became confused to such a degree that I could not determine whether it was my body or the river that was moving. How could I be so confused about the relationship between my body and the river? A while after finishing the performance, I came to realize that the reason was because I had been so focused—to the extreme, like the point of a needle, which has no space but only location. And when there is no space but only location, you're open to all dimensionality; you cannot relate your physical body to any particular thing or direction because you are simultaneously unrelated and entirely related within. I had become confused in that zero point of time and space, and it was a profound and humbling moment of awareness of my own ephemerality.
  Also, when I did the second version of A Needle Woman (2005) I focused more on my body as an axis of time: it has more emphasis as a video piece rather than a performance in comparison to the previous version and is presented in slow motion, whereas the first version focuses on my body as an axis of space in a realtime performance. I accentuated a temporal aspect and reduced the tension of the world in this second version by slowing down the video so that passersby have a longer interaction with my body, and this smoothed out even aggressive actions. Also, the viewers' experience of a slightly longer duration during these moments of interaction allows the delicate psychological threads woven into this video to become apparent. Slowing down the video's speed produces an expansion of time and creates a stretched stillness as a result. My body in stillness slows down to the degree of permanency, a zero point of time, the central needle point of a clock. I have been increasingly interested in extending time while observing the phenomenon of duration.

• In An Album : Hudson Guild, the camera focuses on each individual's face for a certain length of time and freezes their movement at one point, thereby seeming to transform a moment into eternity. An awareness of time becomes more obvious in this video through the psychological journeys visible on the faces of each individual, whom I filmed closely for many minutes. It is as if I had stopped each person walking by me in A Needle Woman to give my gaze—carefully and closely, one person at a time—to them and all the individuals who pass through my life. I must say, this creates a continuum linking this work with A Needle Woman, and there is still much to explore in what time can reveal. But time reveals things to us only when we have consciousness.

• DA : What about the psychological dimension of duration? What's going on in your mind and what connection do you make with the people around you, especially in a piece like A Beggar Woman (2000–2001)?

• K : When I did A Needle Woman, I felt a great empathy for the humanity around me just by gazing at people coming and going. It's a short moment, but in it one can grasp the essence of the ephemerality of human reality. Also I felt a great amount of affection toward the people I encountered. All of those emotions about people were accumulating in my body and embracing me. By the end, I was filled with such fulfilment, peace and happiness. The performance of A Needle Woman was a truly amazing experience for me.
  In the various performances of A Beggar Woman, in contrast to those of A Needle Woman, I relate directly to the specific social reality in a suggestive way by sitting in a pose with my hand outstretched like a beggar. I was not asking for money by posing as a beggar, but instead asking questions by opening my palm to the audience. I didn't expect that people would react by giving real money in this performance. However, I was given money in most places, and I was extremely touched and humbled by this action, as it was a moment of personal communication for me. The interaction and psychology of reacting to a beggar and giving something to him is complicated for both of the people involved. It is a moment of sympathy/expectation, doubt/anti-doubt, hesitation/frustration, willingness/request, withdrawal/disappointment, anxiety/anger and regret/relief—all of which are tensions that are generated between the giver and the receiver. The only place I wasn't given money was in Cairo, but instead I was given an even more valuable gift there: someone placed a baby chick in my hand, and I was so shocked to have this small, warm, moving life in my outstretched palm—in my bottari. Even if it was a playful gesture, the person who gave me the bird had responded to my open question with a profound answer, "A life." Another special experience was the first performance of A Beggar Woman that I did in Mexico City (2000), where I saw and connected with a man from a distance. I had already felt his presence in advance, and I had the intuition that he would give me his money. As soon as I sensed this, I was very touched and couldn't stop weeping as I awaited his action. I tried hard to maintain my stillness. As he slowly approached, he searched for money in his various pockets. Once he found a coin, he slowly came to me and put it carefully into my palm and then left. This was a real response to me, not to a performer. I have learned a great deal from my performances, about people and cultures.

• DA : I wonder about a piece like Encounter (1998), which is a photograph. As a photographic document, is it therefore more about gesture rather than performance?

• K : Encounter is actually a performative photograph I made in connection with another performative sculpture called Encounter – Looking into Sewing, which I made in 1998 at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel. For this work, I placed a mannequin covered with silk bedcovers at the central intersection of the crossshaped room in the museum's tower and I declared it to be "A Performance." People came and waited, watching the figure/sculpture for a while, expecting some sort of action. When the figure didn't move after a long time, instead of assuming the figure was a performer, the audiences started walking around the figure to try to understand. So I interpreted this interaction on the part of the audience as a kind of "relational performance." That was the original work; the photograph is a re-creation or a record of a similar performative sculpture covering an actual woman inside.

• DA : The idea of speed is one that Western society is both enthralled with and dependent on. Your work seems to function in the opposite way. Is it your intention to slow things down, to change the speed of engagement?

• K : Rather than being against speed, I suppose my work sets up a certain kind of observation in relation to speed. However, sometimes a speeded-up action can also open up reality. For example, I was in Hawaii for a site-specific installation and then ended up making the video A Wind Woman (2003). I was filming while driving along a mountaintop and at a certain point, when the speed of the camera and the car coincided, the lens captured the hidden threads between the sky and the trees—the border between things and space (something I've always been curious about and wished to define), stretching it into a brushstroke of wind/speed. Stretching space and time enables different relationships to be noticeable and awakens us to see the world from totally different perspectives. So by observing how quickly or slowly I look at things through changing speeds, I have discovered a series of historical phases of abstract painting—Realism, Impressionism, Expressionism and even Minimalism—as a series of momentary transitions of painting practices. It took many centuries in the history of painting to arrive at the point where Gerhard Richter's brushstroke is recognized as a unique painting methodology; however, A Wind Woman, for example, demonstrates different movements of painting in the history of modern painting, revealing visual realities in nature that have always been there.
  I began my practice as a painter, and most of my evolution stems from my position as a painter.

Participation

• DA : It seems that your work is very much about the connections you make with humanity, but can you imagine a performance in which there is a surrogate body in place of your own?

• K : It is inevitable that I perform A Needle Woman, as it is about not just the visual representation but also the unique experience I have as a person and a practitioner whose body has been contextualizing the notion of a needle for thirty years now. Most of my performances were about not just the form but also my inner experience. The state of mind I achieve while I stand there comes from a particular motivation and autonomy of the status of my body and mind. I notice that my back reveals the neutral identity and my state of mind at the time. The back is actually one of the most honest parts of our body. When I'm not stable or focused, I feel it is visible in my back. It's critical for me to be centred, with a focused state of mind and body. If someone else did this piece, the results as an experience and the tension of the performance would be completely different. I did direct and re-perform a version of A Beggar Woman as the project Conditions of Anonymity (2005) with a group of about twenty-two volunteers, a work that was commissioned by Creative Time in New York. The performance was done in Times Square while the videos A Laundry Woman – Yamuna River, India (2000) and A Beggar Woman – Cairo (2001) were being presented on an LED screen. I couldn't repeat myself by doing the same performance while my videos were presented on-site, but I was able to direct a group performance of the same action. I thought this performance could be experienced by any individual without pretention, and it worked out very well, with participants sharing amazing individual experiences and the interactions of the performance.

• DA : You speak about your back revealing the truth, but there is also truth in the gaze. Who is the primary audience for you in the case of A Needle Woman? Is it the sea of people walking by you in real life, or are you already thinking of the video projection and the audience that will be behind you?

• K : Both of those are my audiences, and so am I—I, too, am observing from my back while looking forward. At the same time, in order to maintain my body as balanced, I never lock eyes with the passersby. I continuously gaze at a perspective point—a distant needle point. For those watching the video, my body becomes like a vertical needle with a symbolic void in it that allows viewers to enter or erase my body after watching my back for a while, almost like weaving. In the end, it is as if I become an invisible woman whose physicality is erased by waves of people on the street and by audiences—by being watched.

• DA : At what point does the spectator become part of your work? I was reading Jacques Rancière's Emancipated Spectator, and he writes about the need for theatre to mobilize the viewers as much as the actors. When I watched Hudson Guild, I felt that you had activated the participants and that the border between actor, viewer and action had been blurred.

• K : In a way, An Album: Hudson Guild was an extended version of A Needle Woman but with my body removed and the roles reversed. In the first part of the video, I am watching each individual community member via the camera as he or she stares into its lens, and in the moment each enters his or her own imaginary world—regardless of what he or she is looking at—and looks back at the camera, that gaze answers my voice when I call his or her name. Rather than being anonymous people in the street, here people from the street come and sit and perform their own personality during their psychological journey, which allows their specific individuality to emerge. One might think this video has something to do with Andy Warhol's screen tests, but Warhol's approach to celebrities that had personal relationships with him is just the opposite of mine and has totally different associations to each of the performers in relationship to the audience. The gazes of the people in Hudson Guild become a parallel to A Needle Woman's gaze, because now they observe themselves from a fixed position, although I give them the freedom to be who they are and do what they wish. In the second part of the video, I placed them all together in the audience's seats of a theatre for a group video portrait and filmed them from the centre of the stage—treating the audience as performers and placing the camera in the same position of A Needle Woman. As performers of themselves, they seem like a sort of constellation of humanity in their own embodied bottari in the theatre. The frozen gaze of each individual turns the continuity into discontinuity, and at the same time, it transforms a moment into eternity.
  Once I screened this video in the same theatre in which I had filmed it and invited the performers to attend. Doing so mirrored the audience, raising questions about who is the viewer and who is the performer; what is performed and what is activated/de-activated; who is watched and who is watching; and what are we looking at and what do we really see.

• DA : This brings our discussion back to the activation of the individual in society. We are all performers in the theatre of life.

• An artist is not an isolated system. In order to survive he has to continuously interact with the world around him…Theoretically there are no limits to his involvement – Hans Haacke

• Interacting with the world around her is precisely what Kimsooja does throughout her work. Since the early eighties, she has relied on the power of the needle, literally and metaphorically, as a means of expressing the direct interaction between art and life. This is the golden thread that binds her work together. Although educated as a painter in Seoul with a short printmaking scholarship in Paris, Kimsooja quickly discovered the unique possibilities associated with the use of needle and fabric as opposed to brush and canvas. She first discovered fabric as a powerful artistic medium, as a young girl, while sewing a bedcover with her mother. The act of stitching through the surface with a needle made her mind wander; philosophy, artistic process, and history all seemed to converge with the fabric.

• When she first began sewing, Kimsooja wanted to overcome the limited surface of painting by reaching to the other side. She was drawn to the idea of getting in and beyond the membrane of cloth with a needle, and subsequently realized the significance of sewing as a process of wrapping fabric with threads. Kimsooja was intrigued by the continuous and mesmerizing back and forth action involved in sewing, and its inherent creative or mending purpose. From the outset, the process of sewing allowed her to identify herself with the object being sewn, which simultaneously represented an extension of the self. With needle and thread in hand, the mind can wander while the hand goes through the motions of a precise and monotonous craft. Quite simply, Kimsooja had discovered the possibility of sewing meaning into life.

• From the start, the cultural relevance of traditional Korean cloths has been an integral aspect of Kimsooja’s work. The fabrics implemented throughout her work function as powerful traces of the countless personal stories that, when purposefully brought together, speak of the ultimate interconnectedness of all humanity. Her fascination with the formal structure of fabric and the implications of the needle and thread moving through its surface translate to a silent conversation with the fabric, one that also involves an investigation of issues related to craft and traditional women’s roles. Kimsooja’s earliest works involved collage-like techniques that were, for the most part, more formal than conceptual. These delicate, sewn works hinted at important aspects that would unfold in later work. For example, a plain beige t-shirt decorated with roughly sewn patches of red, yellow and green fragments of clothing comprises a study in color, form and composition, and an underlying meaning is woven into the loose threads and rough unfinished edges. While patchwork, quilting, needlework and stitching are implemented in textile works that speak of pain, loss and vulnerability, sewing itself is simply a means of expression, not the end goal. Through the years, Kimsooja’s approach to sewing has become increasingly conceptual; the complete absence of thread or fabric in some works is as important as the bright textiles featured in other works. The power of sewing as metaphor, and the symbolism associated with a sewing needle in particular, relate to universal issues of identity and existentialism that tie all of Kimsooja’s work neatly together.

• Kimsooja’s Deductive Object series from the early nineties is also highly indicative of later developments in her work, particularly in terms of the possibilities associated with conveying life stories through common objects. For this series, Kimsooja made use of culturally specific everyday items, such as kites, reels, shovels, forks, or window frames that she wrapped with swatches of Korean bedcovers and clothes, in works that pushed formal and conceptual boundaries. These ‘already-mades’[1] are strongly linked to issues of domesticity and women’s labor, and are rich with social, cultural and aesthetic implications. In her work with found objects, and bedcovers in particular, Kimsooja stresses that she is most interested in the fact that the cloth or objects are ‘pre-used’ rather than ‘pre-made’. The history of the cloth as connected to its owner is underlined, rather than the significance of the anonymous person who may have sewn the bedcover in the first place. The soul, aura and memory of the objects and fabrics she uses are of utmost importance, both spiritually and conceptually.

• Kimsooja subsequently widened the context of her Deductive Object series by placing emphasis on how the objects relate to the surrounding space. In 1993, she had an important exhibition at PS1 in New York, and one particular installation really stood out. As is so often the case with Kimsooja, ‘complex simplicity’ is precisely what makes the work so powerful. Imagine a white washed brick wall, scattered with small holes, the kind of exhibition wall that most artists and curators would want to smooth out or cover up. Kimsooja engaged directly with this wall, in a beautiful introduction to the idea of sewing as intervention. Hiding in the cracks of the wall, and nestled between the threads of the work, are some very important clues about the direction that Kimsooja’s work was taking – sewing into life. The colorful scraps of fabric scattered around the wall play with the concept of sewing, as each hole in the wall relates to the eye of a needle metaphorically threaded with tiny pieces of cloth. While the overall pattern echoes a textile work in progress, the true essence of the work lies in the space in between, in the connection between the invisible threads that join humanity together. By placing emphasis on metaphor rather than material, Kimsooja reveals the bare threads of her ongoing investigation of existential issues while simultaneously embracing and challenging the possibilities connected with textiles and the practice of sewing.

• In the early nineties, Kimsooja started making bottari, and the underlying conceptual issues that bring art and life together became even more evident. This raised her work to an entirely new level. Kimsooja gained international recognition for these colorful fabric bundles made from traditional Korean cloths, used to wrap and carry one’s possessions. Although bottari can be made using any kind of fabric, Kimsooja intentionally uses abandoned Korean bedcovers made for newlyweds that she subsequently wraps around used clothing. As such, her use of bottari involves a fascinating double entendre. The bottari function as art objects that relate directly to the Korean tradition of wrapping ones possessions, conveying the idea of being on the move, while also functioning as real bottari that contain something of personal value. A perfect balance between pure form and function, they are beautifully situated on the boundary between art and life. Kimsooja’s interest in bottari also signaled a logical transition from a painterly interest in surface planes to the use of fabric as sculptural mass. This gradually led to a more abstract realm, where sewing is implied within the context of various spaces and environments. So, although she had started out with a traditional needle, Kimsooja freed herself from being bound by the needle by purposefully, yet almost imperceptibly, deconstructing the process of sewing, to the extent that the connection to a needle, thread or fabric eventually becomes barely discernable. Ultimately, all that is left in relation to real sewing are conceptual traces of the needle, or the metaphor of a needle as a tool of empowerment and liberation.

• With or without a needle and thread, Kimsooja relays captivating stories through art that relates to life as it relates to the concept of sewing. Sewing as an artistic process, sewing as a quiet contemplative activity, sewing as a conversation with the surface of fabric, sewing as a formal investigation, sewing as a meditative process, sewing as it relates to traditional women’s roles, sewing as craft, sewing as intervention, sewing as wrapping, and sewing as a connective act, are all part of the complex fabric of Kimsooja’s singular artistic approach. Reflections about life and art are spun from a seemingly endless thread that weaves in and out of time and space, where past, present and future are melded into one.

• Around the same time that Kimsooja realized that she could use bottari to effectively express the notion of the totality of art and life, Suzi Gablik was investigating similar themes in her research about connective aesthetics. What Gablik would describe as participative, empathetic and relational modalities of engagement are the defining factors of Kimsooja’s approach to art. Gablik’s theory of connective aesthetics, as outlined in her book The Reenchantment of Art, reads almost as an ode to Kimsooja’s artistic practice. If art should somehow help us to understand our place in the world, if art should work beyond its immediate role as an object and truly relate to our own existence, Kimsooja certainly provides the kind of approach that Gablik was interested in. Mindfulness, consciousness, compassion, and empathy are words that consistently appear in Gablik’s writing, and these words also come to mind in relation to Kimsooja’s practice. Gablik’s search for an enveloping relational vision that would embrace a feminine approach is definitely found in Kimsooja’s work. As Gablik writes, “The sense of everything being in opposition rather than in relation is the essence of the old point of view, whereas the world view that is now emerging demands that we enter into a union with what we perceive, so that we can see with the eyes of compassion.” [2] Twenty years later, Kimsooja’s art is as compassionate and relevant as ever.

• In retrospect, we can see the visible and invisible traces of an artistic practice that has been consistently defined by a very conscious and determined use of the same materials or approach, set within different contexts where new layers of meaning emerge with each new project. The intricate pattern of Kimsooja’s work is created from a needle that keeps pointing towards concepts that are as fluid as they are static, simultaneously material and immaterial, visible and invisible, simple and complex. Louise Bourgeois once said that fibers, whether spun by spiders or created on a spinning wheel, have deep significance, and that threads weave important memories and emotional connections for us all. This truly captures the essence of Kimsooja’s fascination with the stories that are permanently imbedded in the fabrics that have provided an ongoing source of artistic and even spiritual inspiration for Kimsooja.

• Through the years, Kimsooja’s bottari have appeared in many different contexts around the world, almost magical in the way they fit into almost any gallery space or natural environment. Like seasoned world travelers, Kimsooja’s bottari are constantly on the move; whether in a museum space or a forest, appearing in multitudes, or all alone, they have been arranged in a meticulously arranged row, or strewn about in a more chaotic manner, they have remained completely still, or moved 2727 kilometers on a truck. With each new setting, added depth and meaning unfolds.

• In beautiful contrast to the bottari, Kimsooja is equally renowned for her textile installations where the bedcovers are unwrapped, unfolded, laid out, or carefully hung in gorgeous labyrinths of shiny, vibrant fabric. The vividly colored textile work A Laundry Woman, 2000, is a perfect example of this approach. On entering the installation, the viewer is completely surrounded by textiles and is invited to walk through an intricate web of color where pattern and meaning converge. Kimsooja has often compared sewing and walking as similar activities, and describes how this first came about, “In 1994, I started connecting my body as a symbol of a needle in the moment that I was viewing the documentary footage of my daily working process undertaken at Oksanseowon Valley near Kyungju, Korea. I decided to make this as a video performance piece called Sewing into Walking - Kyungju. I identified this walking process in nature—the collecting and gathering of all these bedcovers—as a symbolic needlework which my body was serving.” [3] To walk through A Laundry Woman is to understand the inherent communicative power of textiles, and the underlying meanings are seemingly endless. With each step, as with each stitch, the viewer is one step closer to understanding the metaphysical aspect of work. In this case, the viewer plays the metaphorical role of the needle, winding in and out, betwixt and between these gorgeous fabrics that have a story to tell. The specific choice of decorative Korean bedcovers as intimate possessions that tell life stories of pain, loss, love, and desire is, of course, as significant as ever. These fabrics, colored by cultural and personal histories, are narratives that are literally left hanging for the viewer to unravel as they delicately float between the worlds of art and craft.

• In Kimsooja’s work, each project is inextricably bound to the thread of the next project. From project to project, the conceptual thread is picked up and re-sewn into a complex and interwoven vision of reality. A perfect example of this is seen in the similarities and differences between A Laundry Woman and A Mirror Woman, 2002. These works appear to be quite similar, both formally and conceptually, and they both relate to a wide range of existential issues; yet the simple addition of mirrors that cover the walls is all it takes to set these works dramatically apart. The mirrors contribute to a heightened sense of infinite space, thereby shifting the focus from the immediate reality of the viewer’s experience to an endless space that can be understood as relating more to the universe than the individual. Similar to separate threads in an intricate piece of fabric, even if they don’t touch each other, they are still bound to the same fabric, and every single thread plays an equally important role in contributing to the overall effect. These works are cut from the same cloth, and stand as powerful symbols for the place of each individual in the universe. The message is abundantly clear; without a needle there would be no fabric, without each individual, no fabric of society.

• As we follow the needle to its most abstract form, the significance of sewing as metaphor becomes abundantly clear. A needle is easily understood as an extension of the body, and nowhere is this more evident than in the two-screen video installation A Needle Woman, 1999 where the needle moves in a completely theoretical direction. In one projection Kimsooja stands motionless within various urban environments; in the other she lies immobile on a rock. The two projections create a compelling dialogue of opposites typical of her work in general. In the bustling city streets of Tokyo, Shanghai or Delhi, her role is non-changing; she stands alone, straight as a needle. She sews herself into the fabric of society, disappearing periodically just as a needle would. In the accompanying projection she lies upon a colossal rock in natural surroundings. In contrast to the fast paced city scenes, the only changing elements are the drifting clouds against a clear blue sky, and subtle nuances of light. Clearly, Kimsooja is a metaphor for the needle—she connects two parts and in the end disappears. Her role, or the role of her body, is to interact with the fabric of society and to direct our focus; then she disappears, just as a needle does after it’s job is done.

• In A Needle Woman the body is understood as a needle within the fabric of life. Kimsooja elaborates on this important aspect; ”The mobility of my body comes to represent the immobility of it, locating it in different geographies and socio-cultural contexts. Immobility can only be revealed by mobility, and vice versa. Constant interaction between the mobility of people on the street and the immobility of my body in-situ are activated during the course of the performance depending on the context of the society, the people, nature of the city and that of the streets…I pose ontological questions by juxtaposing my body and outer world in ‘relational condition’ to space/body and time/consciousness.” [4] This captures the essence of Kimsooja’s overall approach, which ultimately relates to the idea of the singularity of the individual as part of an endless multiplicity. Looking at the world through Kimsooja’s eyes, we find ourselves looking at the universe through the eye of a needle. As Kimsooja ‘sews into life’ she simultaneously unravels the thread that is the entire conceptual basis for her work. Imbedded in the visible and invisible seams of her work we see how the traces of migration, war and cultural conflict necessarily affect ones identity and perception of reality—conveyed by an artist who is fully aware of the power of connective aesthetics. Her vision of the totality of art and life is beautifully conveyed through the symbolic power of the needle to mend, heal and connect. She uses a needle to guide us towards awareness and understanding in an approach to art that is intricately spun around the literal and conceptual practice of sewing.

• Kimsooja gives herself to us. She does so through her art not simply because she is an artist, but because through art she can give to others. This exchange between artist and viewer has its rewards, offering access to the essence of human communication as well as essential connections to the larger reality of which we are a part. So following Kimsooja's path of communion among peoples and realms, empathy will be the focus of this essay.

• When we look at Kimsooja's art and see her standing there, we experience her aliveness and partake of her vitality along with our own. Her art makes us feel our aliveness. When we see Kimsooja there, completely still, we also see beyond her and beyond ourselves. Along with her presence in the wind, with the sun and the moon, we sense something more. She endeavors not so much to represent so we can see, but to be one with the world through her work so we can recognize our being too.

• In this way she participates in what cultures have always done. The names of those makers have not come down to us, so we praise past societies without individual recognition. But as she takes up her ancient charge we know her name or do we? To be her art, she consciously steps out of self, taking on a one-word name that "refuses gender identity, marital status, socio-political or cultural and geographical identity by not separating the family name and the first name.[1]"

• Making art as one's way of being, or more accurately way of becoming, is to see art as a path. It can also be a reminder of our shared path, and in that way art is like religion and philosophy. But unlike these other fields of endeavor, art alone can be an experience that words on a page can never quite be. More than explaining a connection between the mundane and spiritual realms, between what is perceived by the senses and what is sensed by the mind, in art these can unite and be one. Making art with this aim of ultimate meaning is an act of hubris (punishable by the ancient Greeks), and a dicey claim in our world today. So this is a precarious start for an essay, though for the work of Kimsooja, a necessary one. Her ambition calls for no less.

• Artists, like philosophers and theologians, are in the business of understanding the relation of the everyday to something greater: ideas, values, the ethereal. But it's not just a professional thing. It's what we do as humans and have done since the beginning of time. This is how we live and must. Each generation, each individual must find their meaning or live a life without it. Kimsooja's concerns are both with the here and now and beyond this place and time. Consciousness overtakes self-consciousness. How can we talk of this? "Spiritual" conjures notions too religious or new age-y for those in contemporary art, while the "unconscious" had a place earlier in the twentieth century, with the birth of psychology. The ambiguity of the ethereal, the other worldly, or unknown, means that it tends to be left out of discussion or to remain tacitly unspoken. "Universal" is a word banished by postmodernism. The claim to represent humanity is a totalizing concept that makes the use of this word suspicious; the complexity of social and cultural difference makes it taboo.

• An understanding of Eastern philosophy, religions, and culture are ways to think about for Kimsooja's art; they clearly enter into the very nature of who she is. Some have expertly written of this, and these references remain central sources for knowing for her art, but there is more, not just because she is a person of our times who lives and works across cultures, but also because there has been a rich cross-pollination between Eastern and Western thought for centuries now. So, while Kimsooja's work is grounded in Asian philosophy[2], I have chosen to write about her work through the lens of the Western pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, who was himself influenced by Taoist and Buddhist philosophy[3]. Turning to Dewey, we encounter the ideas of a humanist not embarrassed to venture into the wholeness of the enterprise that is life, because he, like Kimsooja, believed that a wide view is necessary and that art is the most meaningful way to achieve it.

• As Dewey saw it, life compartmentalized into high and low, and values categorized as profane or spiritual, material or ideal, betrays the nature of things. Likewise, he felt that dividing occupations or interests into practice and insight, imagination from doing, significant purpose from work, and emotion from thought and doing, is to mistake human nature. But when they come together, are one, as in Kimsooja's work, we can experience "deep realizations of intrinsic meanings," " the sense of reality that is in them and behind them," as they tell "a common and enlarged story," and Dewey believed, the ideal can be embodied and realized[4]. Then distinctions of mind and body, soul and matter fade away.

• To Dewey, this sense of continuity between the mundane world and something greater comes with experience, not just by living over time but by living life in a reflective, consciousness way[5]. For Kimsooja, her body is her medium and instrument conscious experience for others, not merely for expression or representation. And Dewey firmly believed, as Kimsooja demonstrates, that the senses, our own bodily capacity can be used directly to access the "spiritual, eternal and universal."[6] In Taoism, these realms are understood as one universal and ubiquitous vital energy. For Dewey we can know this through art.[7] The aliveness and vitality that art produces makes sense of life's experiences as it generates continuity between the earthly and eternal.

• Thus, the experience of art (and for Dewey, art is an experience rather than an entity or object ) puts us in touch with the spiritual, non-physical world. But just as not all experience possesses insight or continuity, not all art rises to the level where it achieve a union of the material and the ideal. Yet when looking at Kimsooja's work, we understand Dewey when he says: "The depth of the responses stirred by works of art shows their continuity with the operations of this enduring experience" because such "works and the responses they evoke are continuous with the very processes of living." Her works affect what this philosopher called: "The mystic aspect of acute esthetic surrender, that renders it so akin as an experience to what religionists term ecstatic communion." [9]

• Being consciously alive rises to the level of the aesthetic. It occurs, to Dewey, when we are fully and completely present in the experience of making and perceiving, but this does not only happen in the act of making art; it can happen in life.[10] For him, like Kimsooja, to live well, in an aesthetic or art way, is to be fully conscious, open, awake. As we are continually evolving in a state of becoming, we need to continually practice awareness. In Dewey's system of thought, in which each individual is responsible for themselves and for advancing society, practice involves putting one's values to work. His concept of the aware individual for his Pragmatist philosophy finds alignment with Buddhism's concept of buddha mind an awakened state of consciousness which respects both everyday action and the search to enlightenment as the same path. But whereas in Buddhism and Taoism this is achieved through meditation, Dewey advocated art. The work of art, in Dewey's view, as an object of practice can be a path to self-realization.

• This path includes understanding others, and in experiencing art, we can experience others. On one level, in viewing art we can share the feelings of others, what we commonly call empathy. On another level, in art we can be with others, something we might describe as an experience of humanity. Dewey knew that empathy was the basis for any social enterprise. Art, for Dewey, had this great capacity for empathetic experience because, he believed, experiencing art is an act of re-creation:

• Works of art are the means by which we enter, through imagination and the emotions they evoke, into other forms of relationship and participation than our own. We understand it in the degree in which we make it a part of our own attitudes, not just by collective information concerning the conditions under which it was produced. We accomplish this result when, to borrow a term from Bergson, we install ourselves in modes of apprehending nature that at first are strange to us. To some degree we become artists ourselves as we undertake this integration, and, by bringing it to pass, our own experience is reoriented. This insensible melting is far more efficacious than the change effected by reasoning, because it enters directly into attitude. [11]

• How might this apply in the art of Kimsooja? A Homeless Woman - Cairo (2001) becomes an object of interest, even of compassion, on the part of passersby who pause to consider her manifestation of a human condition that till then had been almost invisible. In A Beggar Woman the artist presented herself to people in the streets of Delhi (2000), Mexico City (2000), Cairo (2001), and Lagos (2001). A different manifestation of this work occurred with Beggar Woman: Times Square (2005). Misinterpreted in the press as a gesture flying in the face if this city's truly needy, we might contemplate the questions, How do we draw attention to need? Can we experience others throughout a city, beyond just one city, holding in our hearts their hunger? Is acknowledgment of them acceptance without change? Who is in need? Who is present? Who offers what to whom?

• Have you ever received a comment from a homeless person that stayed with you even though you gave nothing, while a thank you in return for money given on another occasion was not a memorable moment? Here the hands of Kimsooja's sitters are in a gesture simultaneously receiving and offering, being needy and charitable, troubled and wise. A practice in many religious traditions including Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Christianity, in which beneficence is manifested through both giving and receiving this act of engagement contains all things. [12]

• Other empathetic works, beginning in 1995 with Sewing into Walking - Dedicated to the Victims of Gwangju, have taken the form of memorials. Clothes stood in for persons, spread out on a mountainside where tragedy had struck. It was a commemoration of as many at 2000 killed there as they rose up against the dictatorship of then-president Chun Doo-hwan. And it was a poultice for the earth. This incident, called 518 to signify its start date of May 18, found a parallel in 9/11 when later Kimsooja was moved to a enact a loving gesture of remembrance. In Epitaph (2002) she laid a single bedspread at Greenlawn cemetery in view of New York's skyline. Clothes, used as in Gwangju, were laid out on the floor of Hitler's former office in Poznan, Poland, to form Mandala: Chant for Auschwitz (2010), while cloth in all its colors and forms flow through four screens of Mumbai: A Laundry Field (2007-08), standing "for human presences and the questions that concern us all," [13] and creating a wider circle of life, not just of this place but many. On this occasion, as in other works, she also draws upon the ancient form of the mandala as a symbol of the universe and a vehicle of practice for focusing attention and bringing one in touch with a realm beyond the profane.

• Carpets of clothes led to newly fashioned carpets with Planted Names (2002). Four woven works memorialize those who made the Middle Passage, packed in rows aboard ships, and then planted in rows the vast carpet of the former rice fields of the plantation site for which they were made [14]. In part inspired by the artist's experience the year before in Nigeria, this work was preceded by Bottari: Alfa Beach (2001) in which the sea sits atop the sky. This inversion is an empathetic response, she said, to "the saddest line I've ever seen in my life, thinking of the destiny of the slaves and their deprived freedom. Thus the flipped horizon was, for me, a disturbed horizon, a disoriented sense of gravity and of the slaves' psychological return I perceived in the curls of the waves reaching the same shore from which they had left." [15]

• Kimsooja embraces the many associations of water: purification and cleansing, the depth of the womb and the vastness of the universe, its lunar cycles or the mind, and fluidity, as Taoism tells us, is the flow of energies and the inevitability of impermanence. In A Lighthouse Woman (2002), a companion to Planted Names, she created a witness to the waters' histories of pain through an oversized needle-like object surrounded by water. Its repeating, hour-long sequence of nine hues projected onto the lighthouse caused it to change as if breathing, saturating it and spilling into a pool the color. Viewers gave time to see this work, participated in being witnesses to time. And in experiencing A Lighthouse Woman they could experience empathy, not as an idea but, as Dewey said, through their individual senses they could actually experience "the spiritual, eternal and universal." Visited communally, there was communion.

• The empathy of each of these works was made real through the use of historical and geographic reference and the artist's astute choice of tangible, material form, yet became the embodiment of others. In perceiving these works, as Dewey knew, we come to understand the wider story of humanity over time and to appreciate others' struggles. This happens across cultures, and even if we think we are more critical and aware of cultural differences than Dewey's generation, there's some truth as he says: "when the art of another culture enters into attitudes that determine our experience genuine continuity is effected. Our own experience does not thereby lose its individuality but it takes unto itself and weds elements that expand its significance"; then experience is one of "complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events," transforming into "participation and communication." [16]

• In Kimsooja's work empathy of specific moments and situations gives way to a greater sense of oneness in humanity. This is the experience we have of Kimsooja's magnum opus, A Needle Woman. Begun in 1999, it is the embodiment of the fluidity of ourselves and our self into others, of time flowing into time, of place flowing into place, of oneness. She is the needle and yet the eye of the needle. She is the key that opens our vision, yet at the same moment the keyhole through which we pass. She shifts seamlessly, fluidly, between being solid and there, to empty, a shadow. Thus, in Needle Woman, we have two sides, too spectator and participant, as we looking at and moving into the scene, seeing others flowing along, being in the flow. Here our full participation is the transformation through the experience of art.

• It has often been remarked that here the artist remains anonymous by not revealing her face. But it is more: she and all the persons in the frame are part of a larger, unframed whole: everything, everywhere. We understand this when this artist says, "I have an ambition as an artist: it is to consume myself to the limit where I will be extinguished. From that moment, I won't need to be an artist anymore, but just a self-sufficient being, or a nothingness that is free from desire." [17] Thus, Kimsooja aspires to a level beyond that of the experience of others and their story, and even beyond humanity as she seeks to approach the experience of a greater realm. To do this, art is a path not a goal, and a way to achieve full self-realization.

• Taoism says the human mind before creation is pure emptiness, and that within this emptiness or void resides all potential. With awareness our mind can return to this state of emptiness, once again becoming part of it, connecting us to the universe and, during moments of insight, producing a sense of oneness with all things. This mental state is not a matter of representing reality; it is a state of being. This all-inclusive reality connects with our own mundane self because it is already ours or, better, it is already us. When Kimsooja speaks of "being consumed to the limit," she participates in that wholeness and is one with it. Art that evokes this multi-dimensional connection possesses an empathetic essentialism that goes beyond coming in touch with the emotions of others to achieve true identification, an understanding of being.

• This level of empathy has been called by Gonzalo Obelleiro "imaginative empathy." It "is concerned with the essence of emotion, not the specifics of its manifestations," he writes, finding Dewey's philosophy of experience useful to ground a pedagogy imaginative empathy [18]. It is true that in addition to art's practical social roles of producing empathy, hence, creating an empathetic state of awareness, Dewey also felt that imagination through art played a social role [19]. But imagination in art and in common parlance has a sense of flights of fancy rather than of truth of experience, so here I prefer to recast this empathy found in the essence of emotion, as "essential empathy."

• In A Needle Woman—Kitakysuhu (1999) the artist lies on an exposed rock of a mountain. Her stillness between earth and sky allows us to perceive the connected transitoriness of all nature, human as well as earthly and heavenly. Moving beyond self, she says: "Over time, I find that my body, with its duration of stillness—breathing in the rhythm of nature—becomes itself a part of nature as matter, neutral, a transcendent state. To me it is like offering and serving my body to nature. [20]" Likewise in Laundry woman—Yamuna River, India (2000), we experience, as she did, a similar oneness. Standing downriver from a cremation site, she faces the ephemeral joining the eternal. She des not represents or expresses this moment of passage but achieves it in a complete enlightened state of awakeness. And when this was achieved, she said, she "finally realized that it is the river that is changing all the time in front of this still body, but it is my body that will be changed and vanish very soon, while the river will remain there, moving slowly, as it is now. [21]" Our life is fluid, always changing, as we float in the river of the universe. As with A Needle Woman, she is in the picture yet evaporates from it, opening up the space for us to enter. As viewers, she gives us a glimpse of an awakened state: initially what it looks like, then with time, if we can achieve a deeper state of consciousness and presence, the chance to fuse and become one with her, replacing the artist, participating ourselves. So her art, like potent, sacred objects of cultures throughout time immemorial are not representations but means to this state of essential empathy, not the picture of it.

• One of the primary aims of perceptual awareness for Dewey is for us to become conscious of the consequences of our actions, on other peoples and humankind, and for the planet. Today we think "planetary" in regard to ecological and environmental stewardship, but Dewey was also thinking in less tangible ways. With an understanding our individual effect on the greater whole, Dewey modeled a responsive and elastic web of consciousness in co-existent, recalling the Buddhist concept of interconnectedness as envisioned as Indra's Net: all things are a part; each reflects the whole; each affects and is affected by every other part.. With a belief that art was useful in guiding personal development toward social good, Dewey seized upon art's exceptional ability to create feelings of empathy and, thus, deeper understanding of the human condition and existential condition. For this he depended on art, for he knew it was essential to imagine a better future.

• In other works, such as A Wind Woman (2003), Kimsooja becomes nature. In Earth—Water—Fire—Air (2010) she works at the site of a nuclear plant in Korea. For A Mirror Woman: The Sun & the Moon (2008), filmed on a beach in Goa, India, she created the moment of eclipse, when the sun and moon become one. The artist, it could be said, is gone in these works, but rather she is fully present with everything. Doris von Drathen has so aptly written of this work when she says the space the artist occupies is "the dividing wall of the mirror that generates consciousness," from which "she can view the impossible, open her range of vision into the cosmos, intensify her own sense of consciousness towards transcendence. At this moment of absolute presence, an ethical dimension reveals itself," whish is at once "the relinquishment of an identity that is defined by belonging" and "an awareness that concentrates utterly and absolutely on the Self." And here, too, we participate as: "The viewer merges into the incessant breathing of the sea, as it gives forth its waves, allowing them to rise and subside in eternal circuit...the viewer becomes susceptible to the circuit of the celestial bodies in the selfsame endlessness of their return [22]. Our full existence demands this connection to something larger.

• Artists can be insightful and make insightful art. If we are perceptive, art can give glimpses of insight. But rarely is art insight. Yet this happens when Kimsooja embodies oneness or, Dewey's terms, continuity, giving herself to us and, when we experience it as we give ourselves to her art and fully participate in it. Participation. It's a word Dewey chose [23], but which has taken on a new meaning in art today as we have lost the capability to participate with art objects, and talk about engaging viewers in modes of participation such as collaborative authorship or other forms of making. Spectatorship connotes detachment, looking at the surface of things or actions. In American and European contemporary life the spectacle society is one of superficial and mediated relationships [24]. The spectator does not feel empathy, but the participant does. And only as a participant can we partake on yet another level of the essential empathy that Kimsooja experiences and which become her art.

• To be a participant in Kimsooja's art does not require sitting in Times Square or being with the artist on a beach in India. It can happen in front of a video in a gallery. To an exceptional degree her art revives the experience of art Dewey knew—where being with art makes all the difference. If we think about the viewer as involved in empathetic relation to the artist's experience, to others' experiences, and to the essence of empathy, then as participants we are caring, hence engaged. Caring, the engaged audience functions like the artist, invested in the moment [25]. This parallel of artist-to-audience is so fundamental that as we experience art we "become artists ourselves." [26] Kimsooja gives us the possibility to do this with her art. If we fully participate, the experience is ours.

• FG: In 2005 Seungduk Kim, your present commissioner for the Pavilion, invited you to participate in a Korean group show she curated at the Vienna Kunsthalle. You didn't agree to take part in such an exhibition. What led you to accept her invitation for Venice? How do you feel about this national identity when you have been a 'self-exiled' artist for so long?

• KSJ: I think 'national exhibition' refers to so many different categories and connotations. For an artist who considers herself a 'self-exile' and a cosmopolitan, the notion of a 'nation', or 'national' is not that simple. The particular concept of the nation or national has to be defined before one can address its criteria. The historical, political, economic and cultural specificities of a society and a nation have a lot to do with an artist in terms of her/his personal and collective identity. These factors define how an artist has built up her/his own perceptions of the world and artistic criteria within the international art scene. A nation is like ones' parents by whom you were raised and who have influenced your life with given conditions and perceptions. When it comes to a collective identity, an artist who pursues his or her own unique and individual vocabularies must have their own point of view as to what category they fit into within a specific group show, or an exhibition as a national representative.
  Over the years I had to decline a number of national group shows including biennales that weren't in line with my personal artistic practice and my beliefs. For example, I declined to participate in a national group exhibition which was an exchange between Korea and China in Beijing a couple of years ago. That decision was a reaction against the constant violence inflicted on an artist Ai Wei Wei by his government. I have no personal relationship with Ai Wei Wei, but I don't believe that a government can deprive an artist of their freedom of expression and perform violent actions towards them regardless of who they are. The decision I made not to participate in this exhibition had nothing to do with the curator, organizer or invited artists and their artistic values but was solely a humanitarian and ethical action; in the attitude of taking a position as an outsider.
  My reaction to the Korean Exhibition at the Kunsthalle Vienna was also an action to declare my position as an outsider. That was still a time when I was questioning "Koreanness". As far as I know, the show examined and juxtaposed two opposite poles in Korean art: the Modern Art group and the Minjung Art group. These two groups were usually not curated together, because they had a certain kind of political conflict between each other and also due to their respective interests in Korean society. As an artist who had tried to keep a distance from any group activities or any hierarchical structures in Korean society, I didn't want to return to that particular political context in a national exhibition such as this, as it was something that I had consciously avoided for much of my career. I have worked hard to retain my autonomy and independence as an artist, although it has not been an easy path for me over the years. Besides which, I had already been introduced to the audiences in Kunsthalle Vienna during a solo show just a few years before and an international group show in Vienna Seccession in the past. It is more to do with my own personal history and position rather than with the show itself. When I saw the catalogue, I thought the show looked quite interesting as a spectator.
  I guess being invited to represent my own country's national pavilion is the most exceptional recognition I can achieve as an artist who considers herself in self-exile. Without a doubt, it is an honor and it is a challenging question for me to work on this particular biennale, so I was willing to develop the best possible project for the Korean Pavilion.

• FG: Seungduk Kim expressed, from the beginning, her wish to focus on the pavilion as an architecturally strong component that the artist will have to play with. How did you take her invitation to mainly connect to this given architectural situation?

• KSJ: I understand how much the nature of the particular architectural elements of the Korean Pavilion has raised questions for the commissioners and invited artists in the past, and we are no exception. However, I value Seungduk Kim's approach to the pavilion, as it has never been examined from a solely architectural perspective. This certainly coincided with my immaterial way of approaching the site specific project and I tried to preserve the original structure of the pavilion while challenging its specific qualities and problems.
  Leaving the whole space empty without installing any objects in it, the installation expands the void to the maximum by taking the architecture of the Korean Pavilion itself as a Bottari (Korean word for bundle). I tried to transform the entire pavilion into 'A Bottari of Light and Sound, Darkness and Soundlessness' that inhales and exhales; as if the architecture itself were my body. I have chosen not to install any objects in the space so that the audience's body may be embraced by the sound of my breathing. The Weaving Factory (2004-2013) sound performance fills the pavilion and proposes a unified experience, together with the yang energy which enters as sunlight, and extending all the way to the yin energy of the black hole in the anechoic chamber.
  The skin of the glass windows is wrapped with the diffraction grating film fabric that defuses the sunlight into a rainbow color spectrum. What we see is the unfolded sunlight and the shadows of nature that shower into the pavilion and are translated into a color spectrum. This light and shadow reflects onto the white walls and simultaneously bounces endlessly back and forth from the mirrored skin of the ceiling and the floor; folding and unfolding into infinity. The darkness in light and the light in darkness is stretched to an extreme into waves of light and sound. The audience's body resides within mine as a whole, wrapping and unwrapping, communicating with each other. The light waves and the sound waves together with my humming and the inhaling and exhaling of my own breath, question the moment of life and death while the mirrors bounce light off their surfaces breathing in and out.
  It was significant that Hurricane Sandy happened in New York right at the moment when we were discussing this project. The experience of living without power, electricity, heat and conveniences for one week with the whole community, was a humbling and contemplative moment. At the same time, this special moment gave me an insight into the Korean pavilion project by encouraging me to construct an anechoic chamber to explore a state of complete darkness and soundlessness. In this way, the visual knowledge of infinite reflection in the main space—which is constructed from purely natural light, finds a counterpoint in the space of the 'unknown' or 'unseen' in the anechoic chamber.

• FG: In general how do you picture your contribution to any exhibition situation: Is it the space that calls first? The people? The context? The location and its history?

• KSJ: I am aware of all the factors and consider them all simultaneously. The artist's job is done by an omnipresent gaze and mind that looks at both the visible and the invisible.

• FG: You have been invited many times to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. So the biennale is no longer an issue for you, but the Korean Pavilion is a new challenge. How do you locate yourself within its specific history? You said you have seen many of the shows there over the years.

• KSJ: I have been invited to participate in the main Venice Biennale exhibition twice. The first time for Harald Szeemann's d'APERTutto (1999), and the second time for Rosa Martinez's exhibition Always a little further (2005), both were shown in the Arsenale. I have also participated in other official exhibitions at the biennale such as the Tiger's Tail (1995) curated by Soyeon Ahn and organized by The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, in the Palazzo Vendramin. Nam June Paik had been at the German pavilion in 1993; this was the following biennale for which he contributed to present large scale Korean Contemporary Art in Venice. It was the first time I had presented my installation with bottaris in Venice. I also participated in Markers (2001) curated by Ryszard Waskow on Garibaldi Street; and ArtTempo (2007) at the Palazzo Fortuni organized by Axel Vervorrdt, and curated by Jean-Hubert Martin and Matijs Visser. This exhibition became an inspiration for many curators to create a historical return of the Gutai group through exhibitions such as the show Daniel Birnbaum invited Matijs Visser to curate at the following Venice biennale. They are now introduced everywhere around the world.
  Most of the biennale projects were marvelous experiences for me, especially when my work was in a context that opens a new dimensionality, was re-contextualized, or when I could create a meaningful new piece that opens up new possibilities. Many of the Biennales I participated in served these kinds of opportunities, and each time I have also been able to see the Korean Pavilion and its projects and other pavilions. This certainly helped me to understand what was going on in the world at that time. It also helped me to form an approach to the Korean Pavilion and an understanding of what position the Korean pavilion has on the contemporary art map, along with its relationship with other pavilions. Therefore, this provided me with some insight as to how to approach the Korean pavilion project and the practicality of dealing with specific local conditions. Most of the biennales I have participated in have given me opportunities to create new commissioned works with challenging themes and audiences. However, I am always interested in challenging new projects that I am inspired by—whether it is a biennale that gets more attention, or a small, remote local project—as long as there exists the possibility to realize work and develop from it.
  This project was inspired not only by Seungduk Kim's approach to the architecture, which assured me the chance to pursue the site-specificity, but also by contemplating Massimiliano Gioni 's title Encyclopidia di Palazzo. For me, this title immediately connects with my thoughts on the notion of bottari and Gioni's reference reiterated a certain common knowledge which is in line with the evolution of my practice. National Pavilions don't always correspond directly to the biennale's main theme, but rather present their artists' own theme independently. However, even if I am not invited to participate in certain projects, I always take curatorial positions as my question and contemplate how I would answer. So I have a number of unrealized projects that are related to projects I was not invited to, but which I considered from my artistic position. Without exception, each time I come to the biennale as a visitor or as an exhibitor, I have examined the Korean Pavilion, asking myself "How could I answer if I were using this space or this theme?" You know, it has already been almost twenty years since I saw the opening of the Korean Pavilion.

• FG: You have been quite familiar with biennales around the world. What stays with you after all these participations? In your work? What are your ideas about biennales and why did you kindly agree to be part of this one?

• KSJ: I must say that many of my projects were developed not only by my own thoughts, but also by interesting themes and questions that have been posed by each of the national or international curators with whom I have worked. Biennales have been one of the exhibition frames that has enabled me to realize a number of my important new projects, as they present a supportive model for new work—rather than showing existing works—either by posing inspiring questions or offering specific spaces and challenging ideas to contemplate. I value all these opportunities for developing new projects and expanding or contextualizing my ideas and practices in new ways. I am always interested in trying to find the best answer I can deliver through my perspective in response to the current aesthetic, philosophical, psychological or political questions posed by curators through their exhibitions, and also in response to the work of writers. Although biennales are often tough, most biennales I have participated in have examined broad and specific current issues of this era, and obviously they fulfill an important role as agents for re-contextualizing contemporary art history. The fabric of my practice and my approach in general has threads that relate directly and indirectly to many current issues in life and art. In fact, any theme can be discussed with my approach towards the 'totality in life and art'.
  For three consecutive biennales, I turned down kind invitations to participate. My decision to decline the invitations had nothing to do with the curatorship, or any other matter, it was purely because I couldn't accept the title of the biennale, which I felt was no longer relevant in this era. As I defined my position, I also couldn't participate in subsequent editions, even if a good friend of mine was inviting me and the show was nothing to do with the problem I found in that biennale's title. I don't serve the biennale itself but instead I participate as a communicator for those whose question is valuable—to find my own answer and experiment with it. I must say, most biennales served my practice so well by opening up my artistic paths and giving me opportunities that I hadn't had before.
  I am skeptical about the current boom of biennales around the world and their political power structures. Sometimes it seems more like manufacturing an industry in order to promote a city as an international destination through a focus on the tourism and economic benefits of staging a biennale. I don't blame cities for this, but I do think sometimes there is a lack of awareness and reflection on the origin of the art biennale model as a structure to examine the cutting edge of contemporary art. Maybe that is also a current symptom that we face in this era that reveals the reality of the commercially driven art world.

• FG: Concerning your project, I am very impressed by your precise way of following the 'brief' to propose, within this framework, a very original environmental creation filling the entire space. How did you come to this solution?

• KSJ: My practice has been increasingly dematerializing since the early days until now. My ultimate goal as an artist is to be liberated from materiality, including my body. To become self-sufficient and freed from desire—for me—is the highest achievement in my art. I wish to be liberated from doing art or making art by extinguishing my artistic energy to the limit. This cannot be achieved by simply stopping the act of making art—paradoxically, it can only be achieved by doing art, living fully, in the most profound and poignant way.
  Since I created To Breathe: A Mirror Woman (2006) at the Crystal Palace in Madrid (curated by Oliva Maria Rubio and commissioned by the Reina Sofia Museum), I reached the point where I could contextualize three decades of my sewing practice process in the most immaterial and conceptual manner. The notion of sewing and that of wrapping and unwrapping in this context, defines the identity of a bottari in the most open and immaterial manner. By emptying the whole space and filling the void only with my breathing, I can address the whole architectural structure as a bottari of light and sound.
  The experience of the Crystal Palace installation helped me to envisage the transformation of the Korean Pavilion into a bottari of light and sound. What differentiates this installation from the Cyrstal Palace installation is the addition of the added element of 'parallel mirror surfaces'. That is; the installation of mirrors on the ceiling as well as the floor, which expands the visual void into infinity. This addition opens up the entire space into an infinite rainbow spectrum—a 'breathing pavilion'. The complete darkness of the anechoic chamber is another important component that I have never examined in conjunction with the parameters of light and sound.
  I hope that all of these elements of immateriality will together create a sensational physical and audio-visual experience for the audiences.

• FG: Seungduk Kim in her text points out something rather new in the comment and analysis of your work: the centripetal nature and forces at work in the pavilion. Are you aware of this idea?

• KSJ: I think the word 'centripetal' serves very well to define the formal and mental structure of my perspective in time and space. Since the beginning of my awareness and art practice, I've been investigating the origins of the cruciform structure in analyzing tableaux, daily objects, physical, psychological human activities and body, and the natural phenomena in its relationship to the cosmic world. During the whole course of my experimentation since the late 1970s, I've been digging into the core structure, even before sewing and wrapping or performing. My piercing gaze and focus naturally transmits into a spiral force. This force has also been embodied in the 'standing still' performance in A Needle Woman (1999-2009) where the stillness of my body functions as an axis of time and space. Standing still can represent the inner turmoil of chaos, speed, the scream and also rebirth.

• FG: You compose the pavilion as a succession of ambient artworks: the main space hosts the diffractions of light in endless reflecting effects through the mirrored floor and ceiling; the semi-circular space at the front of the building is reshaped into an infinite cylindrical room. There is no composition, as you created the conditions with the materials (films, mirrors). You submit to randomness (sunny or cloudy days) and the intensity of effects. It is not the viewer who completes the painting, but the weather in its uncertainty. How did you open up your formal strategy to include such unpredictable and variable elements?

• "The proper place of the inner life is defined solely by the failure to establish any satisfactory relationship with external reality." - Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, 1957

• What has not yet occurred cannot be described, of course... even though we have all the information imaginable on materials, the construction plans, and the display. We experimented with every aspect separately in a highly visual manner: checking samples of aluminium mirror panel for the floor and ceiling; sticking portions of diffraction grating film on the windows of the pavilion on a cold November day; testing the sound-absorbing foam for the anechoic dark room; spending hours on Chinese websites to find ideas for the "by-products": bags, socks, USB keys; going to Dongdaemum night market in Seoul to look for bojagi fabric. In fact if we had already done similar things for previous shows, this time was rather special since all the elements were mass-produced and the entire display is handled by a local construction team. Nothing directly implies an artwork, but there is a huge volume of material for an intangible installation.

• Paradoxes are common in art, but in Kimsooja's case, it comes close to the wire. Which is exactly what makes it exciting, and challenging. Nothing can be gauged in advance, it has to be completed to be delivered and experienced properly. No model, no CGI can offer the final vision... For the artist, it is a method and a life-long involvement, but for the curator there is a certain amount of suspended action. Slowly we will perceive the strengths and effects of the materials, patiently we will figure out the reflections on the ceiling and on the floor, gradually we will begin to fathom the sounds absorbed by layers of thick and heavy rockwool, plasterboard, rubber coatings and sharp foam pyramids. Virtuality will be at play all through the weeks of April and May until the last touch is added by the sound installation. The voice of the artist will imbue the whole environment with organic bodily breathing.

• In order to work within Sukchul Kim's architecture for the Pavilion with no structural modifications, additions or alterations [1], Kimsooja decided that the metal skeleton of the pavilion would receive several skins to shape it into a consistent body: diffraction grating films will cover the glass windows (walls and roof); aluminium mirror panels will be stuck on the floor and fixed to the ceiling; the artist's voice will wrap the main space; an anechoic chamber will occupy the brick pavilion on the South side. The volume of the space will thus be opened out; the skins provide the mutation of the initial transparent cage-like space into a translucent web of light diffracted into rainbow colours, which speed up through an infinity of reflections. Humming and breathing will fill the space with kaleidoscopic volume. A dark anechoic chamber will bury the coloured experience deep inside the visitor's body. Kimsooja's project for the Biennale, To Breathe: Bottari, is original and perfectly fitting within her body of work.

Breathing

• Bringing nurturing air into our lungs, exhaling impoverished air, in a constant balanced movement. Our body is run by capturing the fuel for life. Bringing it in and sending it out. It takes the best and rejects the weakened part of the gas.

Diffracting / Reflecting

• Light will be driven around from surface to surface and it will already be multiple in its diffracted state. Will it be rainbow-like and packed with art historical reminiscences? An infinity mirror à-la-Kusama? A kaleidoscope on an adult scale? Architecture as an engine to provide a kind of light therapy? Viewers are included by definition. If no one is there, then there is nothing! The traditional Korean use of bright colours, plain colours, primary colours is at work everywhere in everyday life, in the past and still now. Red, yellow, blue, white and black, these five colours – or Obangsaek – were considered to be closely related to the five cardinal directions. In Korean, Obang means "five directions" and saek means "colour". Obang consists of north, south, east, west, and the centre of these cardinal points. Each direction has its own colour. North is associated with the colour black. Black stands for winter, water, kidneys, a salty taste, sorrow and knowledge. The colour for south is red. Red means summer, fire, the heart, bitterness, pleasure and propriety. East was assigned the colour blue. Blue represents spring, trees, the liver, sourness, delight and benevolence. West was associated with the colour white. White signifies fall, gold, lungs, pungency, anger and righteousness. Lastly, the centre was attributed the colour yellow. Yellow denotes the spleen, soil, sweetness, greed and wisdom. Beyond such symbolism, these colours (found in fabrics for bedcovers and cushions among other uses) equally strongly address those whose background has been bathed in the utopia of the De Stijl patterns: primary colours in geometric patterns and order. The ghosts of Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg are alive in Korea. Naturally Kimsooja has dealt, and keeps dealing, with these traditional and modernist issues of colour. It helps when tradition, which is often a burden of authoritarian limitations, is aligned with avant-garde references.

Bottari

• In Kimsooja's work, Bottari reads as seminal, motherly, warm, storytelling, formalist, matrix-like, basic, vintage & kitsch, cheap & precious, flexible, endless. Bottari is the result of rolling up pieces of fabric in bundles. A package, a wrapped object. Though they may consist of several pieces of fabric rolled up together in a tautological bag. In the 1990s, Deductive Objects were shown in different locations and particularly in New York at PS1 during a residency programme in 1992-1993. Some works bear the diffused influence of the Paris time while others found their way out and captured the cultural and artistic specificity of the New World. There is one piece (see pp. 117, 132) that can be seen as a turning point for her work – away from the sculptural objects or bidimensional canvas-like pieces, towards site specific environments: it took up an entire wall for a discreet and precise installation of small torn pieces of multicoloured fabric inserted in tiny holes between the bricks of the wall. This piece reminds me of a sacred place. There are traditions in different religions – jewish or buddhist– to use written words as support for prayers or meditation: placing slips of paper containing written prayers in the crevices of the Wall in Jerusalem is much publicised or hanging Lokta paper prayer flag garlands on trees in Tibet. In this instance, slips of fabric replaced the paper, and colours instead of written prayers. As such, the piece deals with memory's narratives and secrets.

Transparency and Obstruction

• Kimsooja's work could also perhaps be qualified as acts of unveiling and disclosing: slips of papers are left behind, a corpus of secrets is wrapped in bundles, she is seen from the back in the video works. Kimsooja does not willingly participate in the transparency of the present world, where everything is supposed to be accessible, revealed, only to be forgotten a moment later. She is keeping layers of narratives deep within the knotted fabric. If she does not show her face in the videos, it means that we will never see the way she looks at the crowds of human beings in the noisy streets of the cities of the world. She stands as an obstacle in the flow, like in Etienne-Jules Marey's poetic science experiences – such as the mechanics of fluids visualised by using a square object (obstacle). Does Kimsooja mean to study how much an obstacle – here a still and quiet standing woman – may slow down the pace of humanity on the move? What will such a woman in grey outfits cause to the movement of a crowd? Often she stays invisible and does not produce any slow down. Swiss professor of French Literature and Historian of Ideas, Jean Starobinski, analysed the constant unbalanced position in the case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau between his sincere desire for "transparency" and his frustration that created "obstruction" and led him to passive resignation.

• Contradiction in form usually creates unsolved situations. In Kimsooja's works, paradox is an engine, a tool for building shelters and places for relief. Neither an "art aid", nor a comfort spot for exhausted art travellers, her places are energy batteries. Transparency is not invisibility. But rather, turning transparent is the ultimate dream of the voyeur: nothing is kept secret, everything is visible, accessible to desire. Architecture in modern times has fought for this since glass could be mass produced in large sizes and reinforced to resist [2]. The combination of clarity (glass) and blurring via a colourgenerating device is one step further than stained-glass in churches, where light comes through coloured glass windows and projects onto the stone paving in a complex palette of colour tones [3].

• For the 2013 Korean Pavilion, with a formal strategy of non-doing, Kimsooja will allow the random good fortune of the changing lights to shape and reshape the whole building. The composition will not be controlled, leaving chance and mischance to create the coloured ambiance. Mirrors on the floor and ceiling will multiply to infinity the reflected coloured lights contained inside the pavilion showering the visitors with jets of diffracted violet, blue, green, yellow, orange and red pure light colours.

Centripetal Acceleration

• The proposed environment will function as a centripetal engine, an unplugged energy plant absorbing energies of any kind like the ever-changing daylight and the empathy left behind by the viewer. Every single component and effect will be sucked up by the centre, by the nucleus. The Korean Pavilion will be turned into a large scale experiential generator.

• The additional room could be described either as the total opposite or as the end result of chromatic light experiences. This anechoic chamber is a darkened space designed to completely absorb the reflections of sound waves and be insulated from exterior sources of noise. It is designed to accommodate just a few people at a time who are prepared to lose their sense of auditory stability and dwell in their own heartbeat or the turmoil of their blood circulation. To complete the Korean Pavilion visit as if attracted and absorbed into a black hole.

• Somehow this could be envisaged as a summary of a number of Kimsooja's previous works in which the elements of the composition have been captured, absorbed, wrapped. We have decided to take the visitors to a region of space from which nothing can escape, neither light, nor sound. A perfect hijacking. For the greater good.

• Place is important in the work of Kimsooja. The Bottari Truck in Exile (1999) was a work on the road, a truck heaped with bundles of clothing and bedcovers wrapped in brilliant silk fabric, travelling from one place to the next. In video work from 1999 to 2001, she traveled to many places around the world to produce pieces such as A Needle Woman (1999-2001) and A Laundry Woman (2000). More recently, she has devoted much effort to site-specific work that transforms an existing place such as the Crystal Palace in Madrid (2005) or the Teatro la Fenice in Venice (2006) through the graceful calibrations of light and color. In many ways, Kimsooja’s art may be described as a searching meditation on the nature of place—asking a number of questions such as what a place is, how it is defined, how long it lasts, who makes it, what the relation of place is to body, and how places are experienced. A Homeless Woman (2001) and A Beggar Woman (2001), videos that document her emplacement within teeming urban crowds as an anonymous female figure dressed in gray, whose silent, immovable presence is literally out of place, disrupting the traffic of befuddled pedestrians, if only for a moment. Some respond by pausing to inspect her, others are bemused by the camera that witnesses their presence. Still others fail to notice her at all, for whom she is nothing but the blurred place through which they hurry on their way to work.

• The signals of critique, whether political or economic or geared to considerations of ethnicity or gender, are not hard to see. One could readily give Kimsooja’s art of place a reading that stresses an incisive reflection on the politics of identity, the social construction of gender and race, the economics of power and agency. Clearly, the crafting of place relies fundamentally on the coordinates of authority, social relations, and hierarchies keyed to ethnicity, race, and gender. And one need not look far in her discussions of her own work to find the artist’s corroboration of a political reading. She dedicated Bottari Truck in Exile, exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1999, to refugees of the current war in Kosovo. Exile is an apt theme in regard to place because it means the loss of one’s native setting or milieu, one’s homeland. Kimsooja brought the truck loaded with bottari (Korean for “bundle”) from Korea to Venice for the Biennale. The work was not simply the truck, but the process of getting it from one place to another. She traversed countless national and international boundaries to transport bundles of laundry, the baggage in which exiles haul the traces of their existence. One thinks of transnationalism and the global flows of labor; of forced migrations; of international traffic in contraband; or of worldwide circuitry of capital pulsing through networks of markets.

• The politics of power and powerlessness, of loss and theft are there, yet one senses that this framework does not exhaust what the work has to offer, where it wants to go. Kimsooja has spoken of the “dimension of pure humanity” as the special interest that drives her work[1]. She wants to ponder what she calls “the human condition and its reality” rather than indict political and economic systems. So she laments the refugees of the war in Kosovo rather than scrutinizing the conditions of the war’s existence. As an artist, human suffering concerns her in the first place, before the failure of social institutions and political will. An artist does not have to choose between the two, of course, but rather than critique and jeremiad, Kimsooja explores the intimate connection of art and moral sensibilities. She is a passionate observer of human beings. All of the work mentioned so far is evidence of an eye bent on the daily routines of human life, using them to register a wistful but wistfully beautiful sense of “the human condition and its reality.”

• One might say that the common and principal function of religion, morality, and traditional philosophy is to posit a human condition as a way of explaining suffering and proposing a solution to it, or at least a way of enduring it. Kimsooja does not want her art to engage viewers as a religion or morality or philosophy. But it is clear that she wants her work to elicit profound aesthetic reflection. Everything she works with is something that bears the traces of human touch—the things women gather and clean, launder and stretch for the wind to dry. The clothing and bedding that touch us everyday, like a second skin. The things we bundle and carry from place to place, the things we save when the house is burning, when the village is destroyed, when the economy collapses. The things that are left when we are gone, that lie scattered on the ground, as in Sewing into Walking (1994) or in Portrait (1991), where a massive cloak of discarded fragments of cloth rises like a monumental gravestone, a mortuary icon of lives whose flesh is remembered in a dense clutter of castoff artifacts. It is the way of all flesh, this scatter of clothing. Sewing into Walking traces a walk through time as a patchy fabric of strewn memories, if even that. This is an elegiac work, bound to evoke in many viewers a sense of what the artist calls “the human condition.”

• According to Buddhist teaching, everything, every feeling, is marked by impermanence, holding no place and passing away. Impermanence joins suffering and non-self as the three characteristics of existence, according to Buddhist thought. As one scholar has summarized the matter, “change, degeneration, and non-essentialism are fundamental features of everything.” [2] Nothing lasts, everything fails to satisfy, and there is no soul or self or substance that abides above it all. In short, there is no place to hold us that will not itself crumble into something else—except the dharma of release, or nirvana. Religions often describe a human condition because they want to diagnose the cause of suffering and to prescribe its solution—either through methods like the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism or the redemption that any number of salvific faiths offer their adherents.

• But Kimsooja does not craft an art tasked with human salvation—either by divine means or by human politics. Her work is not preachy or propagandistic or doctrinaire because what really drives her art is the power of things to provoke thought, to arrest the mind and to fix it on something elusive and mysterious, something we want to take for a truth. Kimsooja wants to cultivate a mindfulness of what human beings encounter by virtue of being human. She ponders what is human—loss, yearning, beauty, routine, work—and does so in the sensuous terms of art that define the places of everyday life. Art is a heightened sensory consciousness, a poignant awareness of the world that opens up in the place that watching, touching, hearing, and making afford. “I’ve never practiced meditation in my life,” she once said in an interview, “but I found every moment for me was a meditation in itself. I reached a similar Zen Buddhism completely through my own way of meditation on life and art and its practice.” [3]

• What does this make of art? The arts used to operate in the service of institutional religion, contributing to devotional life, decorating the altars of churches, shrines, pilgrimage sites, bodying forth the sacred in the daily exchanges between earthly mortals and heavenly powers in a sacred economy of pledge and favor, petition and reward. Popular imagery in everyday religious life still does that for believers today. But fine art has arisen over the last two centuries to occupy a different space in Western culture. For some people, art is a kind of therapy. It conducts a service of comfort, diversion, or uplifting pleasure. For others, however, the benefit must be described in terms of the meditative absorption to which Kimsooja alludes. Art is a way of refining or honing perception, for use as the means of introspection and as a social and cultural lens. In this approach, “aesthetic” does not mean beauty for the sake of beauty, but something more like sensuous cognition, a delicate tooling of the senses to scrutinize the world for the sake of a penetrating take on its weight and heat and chaos. And so we have Kimsooja’s artistic postulation of the human condition. This is neither religion nor politics; neither preaching nor moral reform. It is a limbic way of seeing, a projection of sensation into the larger world for the sake of feeling it vicariously in the skin of an artwork.

• What does that mean? Kimsooja’s art is about the cultural work of looking. You may behold A Needle Woman in at least two ways. First, as a video projected on a screen in a gallery over the course of an exhibition for a few weeks. In this instance the video acts as a documentary, recording human actions at another place and time. The scene is a street, far away, a place that is not here, where you and I are standing. We look upon the place with curiosity. An image of the video’s installation in a gallery shows how this works: a bench invites you to sit down and watch an image projected from above. The image appears, as if through a rectangular aperture that has opened up in the gallery wall. In the dimly lit space, you are urged to sit or stand quietly and gaze upon the scene. You devote yourself to the task, if you have time, because you hope to see something interesting, something you’ve not seen before. You wait for something to happen. It’s art, after all. It’s supposed to do something. But when very little happens, the second way of seeing the piece begins to take shape. You glance furtively about the gallery at those standing near you. You glance at your watch, you wonder how long this will go on. Ineluctably, your perception shifts from looking at a video image-window in the wall to looking at people in your vicinity looking at a video image-window in the wall. You become aware of the discomforts of your body. If you’ve ever meditated, the feeling will be familiar. The scene moves from there, on the other side of the wall, to here, in and around you, and you realize that you are part of the art. The piece takes your time, your body, your patience and invests it in a work that includes you. You might look for the door. You might want to get out of here. Yet you’re intrigued by the two sets of looking—on the screen and in this room, and you wonder what you feel.

• The boundaries of a work of art dissolved in the twentieth century. Art went from hanging on walls and perching on pedestals to happening in deserts and junkyards, on street corners and human bodies. With the dissolution of conventional boundaries came a redefinition of the place of art. So looking at A Needle Woman and A Laundry Woman, we ask: where is the artwork? Is it there, in the crowd’s response to or unawareness of the stolid presence around which they move? Or is it here, among us? Perhaps the two modalities are really one: we are yet another crowd in which the impassive worker woman stands. Perhaps our wandering eye is no different than the urban crowds in Tokyo, Cairo, Mexico City, London, or Delhi. Perhaps Kimsooja lures us into the gallery to sew the art world into the larger fabric of far-flung cities. To see her work is to be transported into a global work of art that shows us to ourselves. The boundaries demarcating the place of this art are disorienting, sublime. There is no getting out of it or away from it. Its center is everywhere, marked by the visual field that pivots on the gray figure of the artist standing steadfastly at the intersection of blinking gazes.

• The steady feature of the artist in these videos is the structure that configures our visual field. Even when she is engulfed by the crowd that weaves obliviously about her, she remains our point of reference. Kimsooja transcends the world out there by holding her back irresolutely toward us, here. The camera is never forgotten. The people there are placed on a stage stretching before us. They were filmed for the purpose of being screened elsewhere. Place as local site is not singular, but part of a larger set of places that only the art viewer is allowed to see. The folks in Delhi don’t know or ever see the people in Mexico City or Shanghai—or us. We do, thanks to Kimsooja’s back. If she only wanted to be a needle, to transform her body into an inanimate object, it would not matter if we saw her from the side or front or any other angle. But we never see her face. This device structures the work of art by showing its proper side, where it is to be viewed—in a gallery. The place of art is a critical moment, a step back in space or time to see anew. Kimsooja wants art to be the world tweaked to make us conscious of place—our place, the place of others, and the place of art, arising in the interstices of culture. Place matters to her because she loves the beguiling way that art seizes our attention and invites our devoted scrutiny.

• The appropriation of place for artistic purposes is something we see elsewhere in Kimsooja’s oeuvre. In the haunting beauty of An Album: Havana (2007), a ten-minute silent video created on site in Cuba. The camera runs for nearly three minutes down a pier overlooking the ocean and a cloudy horizon as lovers, tourists, and fishermen saunter along or sit on a stonewall. The video repeats for a second and third time, but each iteration increasingly blurs focus until in the final run the screen is a blank flicker that gradually transforms into bright light. In the second run we can still recognize the figures, but in the third sequence they evaporate in brownish haze. Deprived of sound and focus, the result is a lushly beautiful portrait of a place that steadily vanishes. What seems at first solid melts into the air, leaving viewers to wonder what their relation is to place that is no more. Memory of place may not be as sure as we’d like to think. With each replay, what we once stood before fades until finally it is gone. With nothing to see, it is not clear that the seer abides.

• In an altogether different piece, Mandala: Zone of Zero (2003), the sound of Tibetan, Gregorian, and Islamic chant animates a scintillating object, a large target-shaped series of concentric circles composed of mirrors, fabric, and colored plastic. Circular mandalas are familiar to North Americans because of the “wheel of time” rituals conducted by lamas who created elaborate sand forms, often in museums [4]. Kimsooja’s Mandala resembles the Tibetan Wheel of Existence, a teaching tool used by itinerant Buddhist teachers who unfurled their charts to explicate the doctrines of Buddhism. The chrome ornaments that mark the four directions on the mandala even recall the jaws of the Lord of Death who holds the wheel in Tibetan tangkas. And like the wheel of dharma set in motion by the Buddha, and the samsaric cycle of rebirth and the circular arrangement of teachings illustrating the Wheel of Existence, Kimsooja’s wheel turns, too.

• But the use of Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim chant in Mandala suggests that the artist has something broader in mind than the traditional Tibetan mandala. The object itself resembles a monumental roulette wheel more than a religious device—the star motifs recall the four-armed spindles at the center of roulette tables. Its glittering mirrors, sumptuous fabrics, gleaming chrome, and loud colors celebrate the ephemeral character of sensation, the flutter of fond feelings one associates with a jukebox full of favorite songs. All of this is very different from Buddhism’s diagnosis of the flitting mind’s need for the discipline of meditation to tame and control it. Yet although the art deco chrome ornamentation of the jukebox in Mandala reminds one of soda fountains and dance halls more than anything in a mediation hall, it does resemble popular Buddhist shrines and temples. One thinks of shiny golden statuettes of bodhisattvas, or of the long lines of brightly colored lanterns that appear each year at temples to celebrate Buddha’s birthday. Mandala spins and flashes like an incandescent turntable as the sound of chanting fills the room. Perhaps the mission of art, if it has one, is to reconnect introspection to the body and the senses. Whether you are in a disco or a Zen hall, you are in your body, and that is the means by which religion, mediation or art take place.

• Both Havana and Mandala invoke Buddhist tradition in different ways. Mandala uses a familiar motif in Tibetan tangkas; Havana recalls the three features of all phenomena: impermanence, dissatisfaction, and no-self. Yet neither piece can be said to emulate Buddhism by offering itself as a tool for Buddhist practice. Both are about the power and place of art in modern life. Where Havana blurs, and finally erases a sense of place, Mandala seems to transpose the viewer from the body of the Buddha enthroned in the mental architecture of an imagined shrine to the splendor of the human body awash in sensation. The point is not therapy or religion or meditation technique, but a refinement of perception, the aesthetic cultivation of imaginative, felt life. Kimsooja’s work is not art in the place of religion, but art as sensory reflection on the places where life happens in the way it does.

• "Hospitality is certainly, necessarily, a right, a duty, an obligation, the greeting of the foreign other as a friend but on the condition that the host, the Wirt, the one who receives, lodges or gives asylum remains the patron, the master of the household, on the condition that he maintains his own authority in his own home, that he looks after himself and sees to and considers all that concerns him and thereby affirms the law of hospitality as the law of the household, oikonomia, the law of his household, the law of a place…." —Jacques Derrida, "Hostipitality" [1]

• The six videos projected simultaneously that comprise the Korean artist Kimsooja's A Needle Woman (2005) present the artist wearing precisely the same clothes, standing precisely the same way, and, it would seem, at the same time of day, the sun shining down. She is absolutely still amid passing crowds of inhabitants in Patan, Nepal; Havana, Cuba; N'Djamena, Chad; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Sana'a, Yemen; and Jerusalem, Israel. The crowds react differently to this odd figure, clearly a foreigner. They are presented in slow motion, with no sound, which only emphasizes the sense of movement, instant reaction, passage.

• A Needle Woman has been written about many times, and Kimsooja is often described in these writings as a nomadic figure in this work, traveling across the world to come to rest in a crowded thoroughfare and then move on to the next. The needle referred to in the title is Kimsooja theorizing herself as a needle that passes through the fabric of a place and its people; and there is that other sense of a needle, that it sews together, is an instrument of suture, of healing, which could not be more appropriate because the locations that are visited in the work are all places of violence, disrepair or unresolved conflict. But as the light falls on her vertical figure, I would suggest another instrument that she can be interpreted to represent, and that is the gnomon.

• A gnomon is the standing element of a sundial that casts the shadow and indicates the hour. It is an index of the sun's passage over the surface of the earth, but not an index of the sun for itself, so to speak, but the sun as a sign of time, and time not for itself but as the sign of what happens ultimately to each of us. Time is the marker of our transition through aging, the marker of our passage, we at the center; and the gnomon, therefore, indicates not only surfaces but human interiority, not only an exterior of sunlight and shadow but time in us, of us, and for us. (The old Greek word gnomon means "indicator," "the one who discerns," or "that which reveals.") This is to say that light and shadow begin on the surface of things, and we inscribe them in a symbolic regime; they become elements in the narrative of our rise in time and our fading, of our moral troubles, our ethical thresholds and flaws. These lights and shadows work their ways into us, embed themselves, and are indicated by the marks our actions leave.

• Kimsooja, who plants herself in the middle of place, which is the activation of space as a locus of meaning, is this gnomon figure, this gnomon of place, against whom the physical light and its symbolic presence falls—an indexical instrument recording human passage and transition. This is on the level of the anthropocentric, of the human as the root of all occasion, all meaningfulness. [2] But the index here does not simply regard the internalization of knowledge, an epistemological dominion of its own self-reflexive primacy. No, Kimsooja, whose face is always unseen in this work, who stands like statuary, a flesh monument to the human, offers us the face of everyone else. These faces are the signifying engines of each tableau. They reflect light passing, of movement that is notated in time, of shadows, of a narrative unspooling, telling the story of a transitory exchange, of the value of the transitory in its opposite: that which leaves a mark. Where is this exchange? It is transacted within that "law of a place" Derrida suggests, which is a place of exchange, with its oikonomia, its discipline of the household's inventory. It is an economy of relations that, like hospitality, assumes an exchange, and it happens here, in A Needle Woman, among a triad of nodes:

1 ) There are the individual faces in the crowd.
2 ) There is Kimsooja, the one who discerns.
3 ) There are the viewers, us, the ones toward whom these faces move.

• The author Susan Stewart has written that a face is a "‘deep' text, a text whose meaning is complicated by change and by a constant series of alterations between a reader and an author," [3] and this is what we find here. These texts are read by Kimsooja, as they read hers. They write each other and read each other, and these trajectories of reciprocity extend to us, the third node of the triad. Kimsooja is the indicator of meaning, that which reveals, which she reads on the faces of these foreigners, who are not foreigners in this place where she is the foreigner, but to her and to us are themselves foreigners in foreign lands, who she instigates to project meaning, and we receive it. Our position, of course, is the same as the artist's. Our expressions, our knowledges, our dispositions are not seen, since we too face forward, away from others. If she is the index of these texts, then we who receive the meanings of these faces are the archive. In us lie the accumulation of their expressions and perceived meanings. They leave notations, marks.

• In each of these places where Kimsooja has come, she writes herself into another book, another register: the book of guests. As such she has the right to be treated decently, without aggression, by the people of any foreign land, as Immanuel Kant says. He says it plainly in his tract from 1795, "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch," of which the third section is entitled, "The Law of World Citizenship Shall Be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality." He writes that hospitality is "not a question of philanthropy but of right. Hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives on the soil of another." Her position is one of cosmopolitan demand. International law supports this principle of cosmopolitanism: If I intend to do you no harm, I will not be the subject of hostility when I cross into your territory. That is the right of cosmopolitanism, of hospitality.

• But of course note that hostility has the word "host" within it, so it is buried within the genealogy of human praxis that to be host may also mean to be an aggressor. So it is that this turning of tables, this inversion of meaning, is embedded within the figure of Kimsooja herself. She would seem to be the guest here in Jerusalem, Patan, Havana, and so forth, an open receptor of her hosts' reactions to her presence. But there is always this possibility of inversion in these terms of host and guest. In her presencing, she is the aggressor, the one who makes a demand, the one who claims by her indexical stance an ownership of place, this space of meaning-making, a directive presence, an emanation of control projected onto her guests, who instantaneously and therefore unwittingly enter into her symbolic territory and offer up to her, as guests do, something of themselves that she requires for their entrance. As the gnomon, she records these passages, her monitoring of time's essence as the passage of the body, its consciousness, and its disposition of knowledge and meaning. This is what we see. This is what then enters into us and is stored in our memories.

• There is another machine at work in A Needle Woman because what I have been describing are machines, mechanisms that produce end-products through their labors—in this case, writing machines and reading machines, machines that record each place's citizens caught in the encounter of revealing their reaction to foreignness and leaving their text for the artist, for us. The task the artist has given herself is to be the apparatus of this textuality, to perform it in each of these spaces where, as Henri Lefebvre states, space "is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand, and all other bodies on the other." [4] It is in this spatial situation that Kimsooja's body performs the act of a particular inscription: this revealing of difference. For as I've said, each of these places she has chosen to stand in is a conflict zone, and violence can be defined as a foreignness alien to a first state of being in its tolerance of difference that is Edenic peace. These are then places alien to themselves, and Kimsooja is an alien in these lands of alienation, an index of Otherness in which everyone is an Other as long as there is no resolution of difference or in which difference has not been an accepted resolution in itself. The artist has loaded her meaning-machine with the data of geopolitics and history. And with that data stored, she adds the element of the foreign irritant (herself), the virus, the possibility of another data set with which this first data set must interact.

• If Kimsooja's first machine is the performance-body in the operative process of revealing the text of foreignness, this other machine is a byproduct of her body's performance: a different kind of machine, a self-referential machine, an aesthetic machine—the machine of Modernism, built in the nineteenth century, dominant in the twentieth, and still working today. Its operating principle is the self-conscious unveiling of an artwork's mechanism, as Mallarmé unveiled the workings of the poem through a poetry about the self-consciousness of making a poem; as the Cubists made representational illusion on a painted surface a problem of painting to be observed, broken down, and rebuilt, etc. This machine is made manifest in the form that it takes before us here: A Needle Woman as video, as a time-based transition of images that hosts time while denying time the ultimacy of its ongoing forward movement. Her video's slow motion distends time and then keeps stopping, refusing it continuity because the video implies that time goes on, then cuts it off over and over in a loop of suspension. The continuity of time in A Needle Woman lasts for precisely ten minutes and thirty seconds. Then it begins again. Nor is it one time that starts and stops; its six places present six times starting and stopping simultaneously.

• It does not contradict my argument to say, "Well, that's true of any film, video, TV show, streaming webcast, radio program, even a theater play." That may be so, but nonetheless it is here the matter of specific artistic choice that is crucial. In the first performance video of A Needle Woman, executed in 1999, Kimsooja did not use slow motion; it was presented in "real" time. But here she purposefully does so, availing herself of the medium's technical self-consciousness of time, revealing the medium's unwillingness to surrender to the time-ness of time, to its continuity, and instead overwhelms it, denies it, commands it, erupts it. (Modernism counts among its hallmarks discontinuity and eruption.) In this sense, her video is a parasite of time, a foreign guest who overtakes its host, just as Derrida says that the host can become the hostage. [5]

• This self-referential aesthetic machine is a ghostly presence, for ghost and guest are also words that share the same root in their signifying of the one who visits. This machine of representation hovers, being hosted by time and yet taking time hostage, revealing this internal conflict that remains unresolved—an echo, a shadow laid down over the video's first presence as the record of bodies as meaning-machines whose subject, too, is the encounter of conflict that remains unresolved, the question of the foreigner. Subject and mechanism share the double-position of the aporia, of an internal confrontation of contradictory forces who are both hosts and guests, just as Kimsooja's figure in A Needle Woman stands in this double-position, this double-imposition of silent entreaty and power's requisition of others for one's own purpose. Her figure, then, belongs to the discourse of hospitality. She is the steward of the aporia, the body of supplicant and sovereign, of visitor and imposing owner of place, a needle piercing time, not healing it, but holding it in suspension. Yet we, who are the third node in this transaction, are not outside of time, not held in place. The gnomon of foreignness falls across us and enters us. Time continues in us as foreignness does, with its demands on hosts and guests, its questions of domination, its juridications, its texts, its burdens and pleasures that enter us again, now held by us: an inquiry, an offering, a mirror, a virus of troubled rights.

• This year's Venice Biennale's subject, the 'Encyclopedic Palace', is conceived by Biennale director Massimiliano Gioni after M. Auriti's 'Il Enciclopedico Palazzo del Mondo' in the 1950s. Auriti's model built on a 1:200 scale, welcomes guests at the central Pavilion of Giardini. The original 136 floor skyscraper-to-be would have occupied a vast area in Washington DC and would have played host to an international knowledge database from all times.

• In a similar fashion to Auriti, Kippenberger's utopic 'Metro-Net World Connection' series (1993-7) envisaging a vast network of tube lines connecting the entire world, materialised with the production of only but a few real-life metro-like entrances (such as the one on the Greek island of Syros). His work was posthumously exhibited at the German Pavilion of the 50th Biennale in 2003 and although it did not become the subject of the entire Biennale back then, the profound romanticism, idealisation and conceptualisation of both arcadian cases inspired artists and philosophers on a grand scale.

• This year's 88 national participations scattered at the Arsenale, Giardini and various other sites as well as other independent exhibitions around Venice, have tailor made their shows to fit and survey this year's theme.

• How can art evolve and expand along the lines of "what could knowledge be or become"? The answer derives from the spectrum of what the modern world may accept as valuable piece of information; consequently, that is knowledge-worth extracting and distilling from today's reality. Needless to catalogue the valuable portion of data from the non-valuable, perhaps it all deserves to fall into the 'universal' category of encyclopedic knowledge. This would include pretty much everything in the Platonic and Aristotelian domain.

• For the art enthusiast and critic, the national pavilion behaviourism is always an interesting factor. The perception and acuity of knowledge filtered through national identity and social layering proves to be rather pronounced in this year's Biennale. While several national participations seem to establish their artistic locus via certain political and socio-economic routes, probably in the hope that their chosen narrative will create international awareness, some others free themselves from analogous needs and effectively represent an artistic oeuvre and calibre worth revisiting and investigating further.

• The unique environment of the Korean Pavilion, 'To Breathe: Bottari' (curated by Seungduk Kim), encapsulates both the long artistic tradition of its creator Kimsooja and diverse elements of Korean culture. The transformation of the entire pavilion space into a bubble-like enclosure allows light and sound to dominate throughout, instantly activating the viewer's senses. We are invited to experience the given domain and increasingly become part of it. But by entering a small dark anechoic chamber and remaining there in a state of blandness for just one minute the visitor is vulgarly amputated from their senses. Kimsooja's exploration of senses via the stern process of 'total voidance' created by introducing this black hole reaches (via manipulating our living environment) a state of realisation and, therefore, total appreciation of our current known situation. By actively involving the viewer with this experience, the artist succeeds in producing an ongoing mass performance thus generating a living intervention.

• Konrad Smolen愀ki of the Polish Pavilion works along the same lines of understanding our senses in a natural and non-natural, controlled environment. His installation, 'Everything Was Forever, Until it Was No More' (curated by Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera), encompasses the assessment of sound produced by a traditional instrument (two bronze handmade ecclesiastical bells), its reproduction by loudspeakers and its processing with a special technique that re-transmits a delayed, altered resounding sound wave. Smolen愀ki's lengthy research on the properties of sound and time has not only achieved to de-characterise and separate a source from its very own physical sound but also to free and re-baptise the latter with a brand new hypostasis. The 'newly born' abstract sound echoing forcefully among the pavilion walls voids the original pre-sound minimalistic locus and introduces a surreal time lapse domain. I personally found extremely intriguing how eager visitors were to investigate the soundless space before the activation of the two bells, and how keen they were to abandon it shortly after the production of the reverberating noise despite the earplugs provided. This intense discomfort may be explained as the natural result of the process of deconstruction of senses through deanalysing and decoding noise against time. It all proves how complex it can be to re-register in our collective unconscious a modified detail in one of our senses. Coincidentally enough, the artist has been recently asked by the Biennale organisers to pause the installation until further notice.

• Outside the borders of Biennale proper, the Azerbaijan Pavilion situated at Campo San Stefano presents a group exhibition of six young artists focusing on aspects of cultural existence, ethnic distinctiveness and social discourse. 'Ornamentation', the title of Azerbaijan's show (curated by Hervé Mikaeloff), is an amalgamation of decorative arts, religion and tradition infused with contemporary vision. Rashad Alakbarov's installations, 'Intersection' and 'Miniature', are assemblages of random objects made of wood or metal organised in -what appears to be- unsystematic fashion. Only when a projector light hits the mass of objects we witness the hidden imagery forming on the opposite wall. Although sharing a very similar technique with other highly acclaimed artists such as Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Alakbarov's chosen shadow iconography is profound; from the traditional shebeke designs and patterns to a human reclining figure and an optical illusion that reveals its message only when you use a camera.

• "It is not chaos" appears through the camera lens pointing out to the [semi]obvious oxymoron, that the actual appearance of things can only be subjective, the mass of knowledge generated from the conscious world can only be interpreted through the de-construction and re-construction of its individual components.

• Auriti's vision can only depart from its limbo by praising the value of senses. This year's Biennale has had several strong participants, whose artistic oeuvre and exploration have gone a step further and, undoubtedly, increased our expectations in the fields of research, technological development and medium advancement, and in absolute synchronicity with the latest psychoanalytic, philosophical and scientific impetus.

한국관 건축양식에 스며드는 '보따리'

김수자 작가는 1990년대 초에 '보따리' 연작을 시작했고 한국 가정에서 일상적으로 사용되는 전통 자수로 장식된 이불보를 국제적인 현대미술의 조형언어로 발전시켰다. 작가는 이불보의 레디메이드 특성보다는 '이미 사용되었었던' 헌 물건이라는 점에 초점을 두고, 그 천들을 사용한 사람들의 무명성과, 육체, 운명 등의 비물질적이고 비가시적인 것에 대한, 즉 삶에 대한 해석의 공감대를 형성하는 데 노력해왔다.
작가는 이불보가 사람의 탄생과 죽음, 수면과 사랑, 고통과 꿈 등의 사건들이 발생하는 현장임을 지적했고, 사랑과 복, 행운, 장수, 후손 등의 기원을 상징하는 이불보의 자수 장식을 강조했다. 작가는 이불보에서 인간의 존재를 규정짓는 틀을 가리키는 색인적 기호를 발견했다.
작가는 또한 이불보가 내포하는 젠더의 역할과 미적 구조에도 초점을 두었다. 이불보는 가정에서의 여성노동, 사회에 가려진 여성의 무보상 업무와 활동을 암시한다. 이불보 상징을 활용하는 작가의 활동은 여성의 사회적, 문화적, 미적 의미를 재정립하는 행위였고, 현대예술사에서 여성의 독특한 맥락을 창조하는 행위였다.
올 2013년 베니스비엔날레 한국관에 설치될 '보따리'는 장소특정적인(site-specific) 설치가 될 것이다. 김수자 작가는 유리, 철조, 나무 등의 다양한 건축 자재와 굴곡진 벽면 등의 일반적인 파빌리온 건축양식을 갖춘 한국관을 전시를 위해 변형시키지 않고, 기존의 건축양식을 최대한으로 살리면서 그 구조 자체가 작가의 특징적인 개념인 '보따리'의 연장선으로 기능하도록 프로젝트를 구상한다.
소리, 빛, 색채 등 인간의 오감을 자극하는 감성적인 요소들을 사용하여 관객이 전시공간을 '몸'으로 체험할 수 있게끔 하는 체험 중점적인(experiential) 전시가 될 것이다. 그러나 전시는 동시에 상징체계의 역할도 수행할 것이다. 왜냐하면, 작가가 바깥 자연을 실내공간 안으로 끌고 들어와 밖을 안에서 보는 상황을 창조하여 안과 밖의 경계선을 넘나들 뿐만 아니라, 전시공간 자체를 자족적인 자연으로 전환시켜 인간의식의 소우주를 재구성하려는 계획을 세우고 있기 때문이다.
잡동사니를 이동하려는 의도를 충족시키는 수단이라기보다는 그 잡동사니를 묶는 목적을 충당하는 보따리의 기능에서 김 작가는 변화무쌍한 인간역사, 다양한 요소로 구성된 세계, 혹은 다면적이고 다층적인 한 개인의 정체성과 삶을 하나로 묶는 틀의 개념을 발견한다.

우주와 삶의 총체성, 그리고 보편성의 함유

김수자의 보따리는 하나로 결합된 우주를 상징한다. 여기서 우주는 인간의 의식세계를 의미한다. 보따리는 삶의 총체성을 상징하는 도구로 사용되고, 삶을 총체성의 관점에서 해석할 수 있는 수단으로 활용된다.
그 보따리 상징의 의도는 '하나로 된 우주'라는 개념을 소통, 혹은 타인에게 전달하려는 것이다. 반면 그 보따리 상징의 목적은 '하나로 된 우주'라는 개념을 재현하는 데 있다. 이 점에서, 즉 이동수단으로 지각되는 보따리가 자족적인 우주공간의 상징으로 전환된다는 점에서 김수자의 창조성과 예술성이 두드러진다. 김 작가의 과거 작업들을 살펴보면, 우주의 총체성을 의미하는 '보따리' 개념의 확장은 전통 한국가정에서 일상적으로 사용되는 보따리를 전시장으로 옮겨 놓아 첫째, 그 일상적 맥락의 해체를 통해, 그리고 둘째, 시각예술이란 새로운 맥락과의 결합을 통해 성공적으로 이루어진다.
김수자 작가는 지난 30여 년 동안 전체성과 보편성을 토론하는 작업을 일관성 있게 추구해 왔다. 삶의 총체적인 틀을 논하는 '보따리'도 그렇고, 천조각들을 꿰매어 하나로 연결 짓는 바늘의 의미를 논하는 '바늘 여인'도 마찬가지이다. 그의 작업이 제시하는 전체성과 보편성은 관객에 의해 특수하게 분석되어야 한다.
마시밀리아노 지오니가 기획하는 올해 베니스비엔날레 미술전의 주제는 인간역사에서 나타난 모든 창조물을 수집하고자하는, 실행 불가능한 인간의 집착적인 의지를 표현하는 '백과사전적 궁전'이다. 우주의 총체성과 보편성을 논하는 김수자의 '보따리' 개념은 비엔날레의 전체적인 주제개념에 딱 맞아떨어지는 안성맞춤이다. 따라서 올해 한국관의 김수자 <보따리>전은 맥락특정적인(context-specific) 전시가 될 것이다.
나아가 올해 한국관 전시는 절묘하게 시기적절한(time-specific) 행사가 될 것이다. 김 작가는 뉴욕에서 허리케인 샌디를 경험했다. 전기와 가스, 그리고 온수가 없이 일주일간을 고통스럽게 산 작가는 많은 생각을 하는 시간을 갖게 되었고, 그 경험을 바탕으로 세계 도처에서 갈수록 빈번하게 발생하는 천재지변을 토론하는 새 작업을 이번 한국관 전시를 통해서 발표할 예정이다. 따라서 자연재해 문제를 다루는 환경의식(environment-conscious)적인 작업이 예상된다.
이렇게 한국의 가정문화, 베니스비엔날레 미술전, 한국관의 건축 특징, 작가 개인의 경험, 관객의 감수성 등 다층적이고 다면적인 요소들을 꿰어 하나의 네트워크로 결합시키는 김수자의 2013년 베니스비엔날레 한국관 '보따리' 설치는 이 국제전에서 보기 드문 보석 같은 전시가 될 것으로 기대된다

• During the twentieth century the desire to build bridges of spiritual intelligence between East and West has helped balance the excesses of the rationalist mind while it has eased the suffering imposed on the planet in the name of progress. The growing popularisation of Buddhist philosophy, the critical questioning of counterculture and non-violent dissidence and the continuous diaspora of Asian artists have resulted in new perspectives that extend and illuminate the global horizon.

• In this landscape of exchanges, The Secret of the Golden Flower, a Taoist text written almost two thousand years ago, arrived in the West thanks to psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and sinologist Richard Wilhelm, who published the first English version in 1931. Jung and Wilhelm suggested the interconnection between gnosis (as a hermetic tradition of the profound knowledge of the Self), methods of physical and emotional healing such as yoga, and processes in the collective unconscious understood as a psychic substratum common to mankind as a whole. The Secret of the Golden Flower is also an alchemical treatise on inner transformation, which is something pursued by the masters of all mystical traditions. 'The Golden Flower is the Light, and the Light of Heaven is the Tao.' [1]

• In another book, Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, we learn of the adventures of the legendary Venetian traveller Marco Polo, who arrived at the Mongolian court of Kublai Kahn in the thirteenth century. Remaining at the court as an ambassador for seventeen years, the story reveals how he entertained the Kahn with the tales of the cities he had visited during his travels, many of them imaginary. The book ends with an instructive reflection: 'The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by living together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno and make them endure, give them space.' [2]

• The work by Kimsooja is inscribed in this very context of learning and wisdom, as for over three decades her proposals have sought new forms of connection between East and West and have created spaces of beauty, healing and awakening. On her travels as an international artist Kimsooja has visited the most varied places, carrying out performances, making documentary films, holding exhibitions of her works and producing site-specific interventions. Her oeuvre has connected the genealogy of Korean culture to the linguistic systems of global contemporary art in a synthesis that, as José Roca has put it, maintains 'a position of resistance against being digested into an aseptic internationalism,' while it intends, 'in these days of multiculturalism, to hyperbolize the characteristics of its difference to become more "exotic" in a medium eager for otherness.' [3]

• Kimsooja has prioritised intuition as a means of knowledge, linking different cultures with threads that can be visible or invisible, always seeking a common anthropological substratum as, from a clearly universalistic vision, she considers that everything about human nature concerns her. 'My philosophical and artistic aim is to achieve the totality which absorbs and unites the whole question of self and the world.' [4]

• The cities, paths and landscapes travelled by Kimsooja are neither fantastic nor imaginary. Her metropolises are real, overpopulated, impoverished by war, colonial exploitation or ideological embargoes. The streets she chooses are paths travelled by beings that survive within the limits determined by their geopolitical position. She also chooses ancient places or contexts in which the primeval forces of nature unfold. Very often her firm slender body appears amidst the crowds or on the silhouette of a rock, either standing up or lying down, but always motionless and with her back to the spectator. This generic and at once recognisable body, the lank hair tied back, remains static and contemplative, allowing the world—be it India's River Yamuna or Cairo's human sea—to flow before or around her. 'For me the most important thing to arise out of these performances is my own experience of self and awareness as a process rather than the video as a result. That's how I continue to ask questions to the world and to myself.' [5]

• These works have the intensity of a hypnotic trance. They manage to draw spectators out of their mental dispersion, making them momentarily identify with the artist's own experience. Their titles are apposite for focusing on her philosophical and archetypal concerns. The Earth and the Heaven (1984), Toward the Mother Earth (1990-1991) and The Mind and the World (1991) speak of cosmological connections. A Needle Woman (1999-2009), A Beggar Woman (2000-2001), A Laundry Woman (2000), A Mirror Woman (2002) and A Wind Woman (2003) allude to woman's role as healer and mediator. To Breathe/Respirar (2006) addresses key emotions through breathing and the diffraction of light, while Earth-Water-Fire-Air (2009-2010) returns to the contemplation of the fundamental elements of nature.

• In formal terms, Kimsooja's evolution reveals how she was surrounded by, and yet remained independent from, the dominant forces in Korea from the late seventies to the nineties, i.e., monochrome painting and the Minjung movement, turning instead to two-dimensional sewn works in the eighties and sculptural objects, Bottari installations and time-based performances and videos in the nineties. Her iconic Bottari, her mysterious 'deductive' objects and her installations evince how her mature artistic language falls into the field of expanded sculpture. Since Joseph Beuys said that even a thought can be considered sculpture insofar as it plastically shapes the spectator's mind, and Piero Manzoni converted the world into a giant ready-made when he built his Socle du Monde (1961), artists have explored, reconstructed or reinvented reality starting from its fundamental materials: people, nature, desire and destruction.

• Kimsooja fixes her gaze on the world and intervenes in it, always in an extremely delicate way for, juxtaposing terminology, she considers what exists more a 'ready-used' than a 'ready-made'. She used clothes belonging to her grandmother for the very first time in 1983, and since then traditional Korean clothes and bedcovers have been a means of recycling 'our body and life itself.' [6]

• Whether they compose Bottari or unfold in space, these used Korean bedcovers, as canvases and as frames of our life, have appeared as a constant feature in her work, just as her own body has been a performative sculpture, a symbolic needle that abandons the place once its healing mediation is over. 'Sewing and wrapping clothes have always been processes shred with contemplation and healing,' says the artist, adding, 'The relationship of the needle to the fabric is same as my body to the universe.' [7]

• As well as having close ties with the Korean female domestic roles, Kimsooja's work bears similarities with the visions of other artists such as Louise Bourgeois, who has also considered the ambivalent power of the needle and its ability to heal. When Kimsooja stands with her back to the camera, her work can be visually associated with that by Caspar David Friedrich, and yet she establishes a conceptual difference: for while the character depicted by Friedrich is immersed in cosmic solitude, her gaze offers us a non-tragic proximity in which stillness is a form of knowledge. Her continuous search for sacred geometry connects the horizontal with the vertical—the earth, the sky, and the human being, the same three basic elements of Taoism—and with yin and yang as energies that structure the world, all of which bears similarities with the theosophical and abstract research by painters such as Piet Mondrian.

• Among the works on display in this exhibition are a few essential pieces in her creative itinerary that had not hitherto been shown in Korea. In Bottari: Alfa Beach (2001) the inverted arrangement of the horizon between the sea and the sky visualises the artist's consciousness and feelings: 'The inversion happened when I saw the horizon from the Alfa Beach in Nigeria where African slaves were sent to Atlantic ocean—this was the saddest line I've ever seen in my life, thinking of the destiny of the slaves and their deprived freedom. Thus the flipped horizon was, for me, a disturbed horizon, a disorientated sense of gravity and of the slaves' psychological return I perceived in the curls of the waves reaching the same shore from which they had left." [8]

• In the trilogy Mirror of Water, Mirror of Air, Mirror of Wind (2010), filmed in Greenland, the texture of the natural elements takes the viewer back to the idea of a pictorial surface that connects so many of her works. A Needle Woman is no doubt one of her masterpieces and a significant icon in the history of contemporary art. In the first edition of the piece (1999-2001) the artist stood with her back to the crowds of Tokyo, Shanghai, Mexico City, London, Delhi, New York, Cairo and Lagos. In the edition made especially for her participation in the Venice Biennale of 2005 she travelled to the cities of Patan, Jerusalem, Sana'a, Havana, Rio de Janeiro and N'Djamena, appearing again as a cosmic needle sewing human tissue to space and timelessness. In A Wind Woman (2003) the fleeting landscapes filmed at high speed by her camera look as if they had been painted by brushstrokes of wind and threads of time in order to extend interstitial spaces. They also betray traces of different pictorial styles such as Impressionism, Expressionism and even Minimalism, as when the landscape is completely dark, light or pervaded by a bright blue sky. In An Album: Havana (2007), a sequence filming the parallel lines of the malecón and the seafront horizon, people and landscape gradually merge to create an abstract, dynamic and yet ethereal composition that ends up dissolving into the light and wind. In these works the artist's body appears elliptical, outside of the screen's field of vision, just as it is in To Breathe – Invisible Needle/Invisible Mirror, a projection of saturated monochrome colours, the changing spectrum of which is synchronised with the sound of the artist's peaceful or strained breathing and with meditative humming. Presented at La Fenice theatre in Venice, it is a return to the issue of canvas and asks 'Where is surface?', along the lines of Minimalist abstraction. 'When the digital colour spectrum is constantly changing, we don't grasp the reality of surface,' [9] says the artist. At the same time, the signs and iconographic motifs of Korean bedcovers and clothes dematerialise as forms and colours dissolve into pure light and breathing sound. The audience breathes visually, in harmony with the artist's sound performance.

• Verging on the ethnographic documentary and yet preserving the spatial format of a four-screen video installation, Mumbai: A Laundry Field (2008) is a visual stroll through overpopulated Mumbai. The camera shows the arduous work of washing laundry: it travels along the narrow streets of the slums, captures dwellings filled with rubble in which people sleep on tarmac and draws up close to the overcrowded trains on an ongoing and oppressive circuit: 'This piece juxtaposes rich visual experience with extremely tough living conditions for mankind. It follows the aesthetics of fabrics as transformed canvases and, at the same time, reveals the harsh reality of daily life in slum areas of Mumbai. … For me it is a retrospective version of older works for it has the dimensions of the fabrics I used to make, both visually and symbolically; clothes and fabrics stand here for human presences and the questions that concern us all.' [10] Thread Routes. Chapter 1. Peru (2010) is the first 16mm film in an ongoing series in which the artist captures the material and immaterial threads woven by different cultures. Chapter 1: Peru begins with a panorama that covers the mountain peaks of the Andes. In the middle of a circular amphitheatre a standing woman turns a spindle. A long downward travelling shot reveals a landscape of farmed fields that resemble woven earth, as do the lines of sedimented sand under the water of a lake, women's plaits and the threads of wool in a loom. In this work the artist uses reiteration as a rhetorical figure, insisting on the slowness of the gaze and committing herself to lengthy descriptions that highlight the poetry of Peruvian thread works and the pictorial juxtaposition of the elements she interconnects. Her intention is for the gaze 'to link weaving and knitting activities to geometrical, agricultural and architectural forms, to the fabric of landscapes and to meditative repetitive actions and festivities that reveal their primeval truth and aesthetics.' [11]

• Art and artists are proven to have a key function—to offer relevant interpretations of the time and place in which they emerge, to shape a path that will penetrate mirages and draw us towards the profound essence of reality. Relevant artists like as Kimsooja act as bridges, mediators, channels that offer the truth of their visions, arresting noise and clearing confusion. Like all other human beings, artists experience thousands of phenomena along their existential paths, but through creative practice they are gradually able to purify them. Kimsooja's oeuvre is characterised by a firm will to reach the deepest spheres of awareness by means of the most accurate of artistic procedures. She does so through works that transport memories, emotions, distances and universal realities; proposals for connecting heaven and earth; gestures that require coming together, alms or silence. The artist has even declared that one of her wishes is to disappear, to become invisible: 'I want to disappear at some point with my own decision, and I've been planning "A Disappearing Woman" piece …". [12] This disappearance has to do with both her own need to become increasingly slight and subtle after having travelled the world burdened by the memories of so many people, and with her reflections on her own ontological question.

• The epitaph the Greek poet Nikos Kazantzakis chose for his tombstone, 'I hope nothing. I fear nothing. I am free,' coincides with the Buddhist teachings of Crazy Wisdom, that declares that this spiritual practice is related to 'all that is free of hope and fear.' [13] Indeed, losing one's fear of not having is to have, and losing one's fear of disappearing is to remain.

• In her oeuvre Kimsooja wishes to find new ways of perception in 'doing' by 'non-doing', for 'doing nothing' may reveal something meaningful as 'the moment of awareness or a moment of light that results from artistic practice itself.' [14] Thanks to this wise balance we may discover a third eye with which to contemplate the true foundations of art and life without fearing we shall dissolve or disappear, as we shall go back to being air, water, earth and fire, fully aware that every practice conveys a possibility of light and every death implies a new rebirth.

• C.G: I just arrived on the island of Møen in Denmark, where your work will shortly be shown. Last night I spoke with a young Swedish traveler and he said, “I am interested in learning everything by doing nothing.” His statement brought your practice to mind. You have made a series of performance videos that elaborate on each other. A Beggar Woman (2000–2001), A Homeless Woman (2000–2001), and A Needle Woman (1999–2001, 2005, 2009): all present stillness in the midst of chaotic activity. In the latter you inhabit a fixed performative posture within various urban environments, blurring the boundaries between private and public space. In a sense, your body seems to be the place that you inhabit. Could you speak about the relationship between the place of the body (the performative posture) and the geographical place?

• K: You can imagine zooming in, the way a needle engages with a piece of fabric. My body’s mobility comes to represent its immobility, locating it in different geographies and socio-cultural contexts. Immobility can only be revealed by mobility, and vice versa. There is a constant interaction between the mobility of people on the street and the immobility of my body during the performance, depending on the society, people, nature of the city and the streets. Different elements inhabit the site as the qualities of the city and the presence of my body appear as an accumulated container of my own gaze toward humanity, and other gazes reacting to my body. While the decision of the location is based on research of its populations, conflicts, culture, economy, and history, the idea of the immobile performance arrived all of a sudden, like a thunderclap or a Zen moment: the conflict between the extreme mobility of the outer world and my mind’s silence coalesced in my body. I always had the desire to present the unaltered reality of the world, by presenting bodies, objects, and nature without manipulating them or making something new. Instead, I want the audience’s and my experiences to reveal new perceptions of the reality of the world and our existence. I pose ontological questions by juxtaposing my body and the outer world in a relational condition to space/body and time/consciousness.

• C.G: Your video Bottari Truck – Migrateurs (2007) and the sculptural work Deductive Object (2007) will both come to Kunsthal 44 Møen. Both of these works include bottari. In your work Bottari appears as brightly colored fabric bundles, loaded onto carts or trucks, or placed on the floor. The different contexts draw out various metaphors, representing a journey when loaded on a truck, or exile when displayed half-open and scattered. Once you said, “The body is the most complicated bundle.” What are the imagined and symbolic contents of these bottari and how do they relate to the body?

• K: In modern society, bottari (bundles in Korean) have changed into bags; they are the most flexible container in which we carry the minimum of valuables, their use is universal throughout history. We hold onto precious things in dangerous times, such as war, migration, exile, separation, or during an urgent move. Anyone can make a bottari using any kind of fabric. However, I’ve been intentionally using abandoned Korean bedcovers that were made for newly married couples, covered with symbols and embroideries and mostly wrapping used clothing inside—these have significant meanings and questions on life. In other words, my bottari contains husks of our bodies, wrapped with a fabric that is the place of birth, love, dream, suffering, and death—a framing of life.
  While a bottari wraps bodies and souls, containing the past, present, and future, a bottari truck is more a process than a product, or rather it oscillates between process and object as a social sculpture. It represents an abstraction of the individual, of society, of time, and memory. It is a loaded self, a loaded other, a loaded history, and a loaded in-between. My Bottari Truck is an object operating in time and space, locating and dislocating ourselves to the place where we came from, and to where we are going. I consider a Bottari as a womb and a tomb, globe and universe. Bottari Truck is a bundle of a bundle of a bundle, folding and unfolding our mind and geography, time and space.

• C.G: Sewing into Walking (1995) is dedicated to the victims of Gwangju. In this work, piles of clothing and fabric covered the ground and the Bottari were scattered.

• K: It’s a metaphor for the victims of Gwangju uprising in the mid-1980s. The bottari represent people with no power and those forced to remain silent.

• C.G: There seems to be both very private and public aspects to your practice. Many of your early works are meticulously sewn, an activity both intimate and meditative. Yet in your films you work with large crews in public spaces. How do these two methodologies affect your process?

• K: I made the sewn works alone in my studio; the A Needle Woman performances were shot spontaneously, inserting myself into the general public. I traveled alone to meet people in about fifteen large cities on different continents—except Shanghai and Cairo where I couldn’t easily find a videographer in time. It was not always safe and easy. I am the only witness to all of my performances.
  Recently, I started making a film series, Thread Routes (2010–), shot on 16mm film in many locations of different continents. It’s not about my own experience, but instead other men and women who performed the needlework and threadwork respectively. For this project I had to work with a team. It’s been very inspiring for me to work with a team and travel together, communicating with the group. I’ve learned from them and their research. It’s a different process of production, requiring me to work toward an objective, with a collective way of seeing revealing production process. But in the end it is still an intimate process, where I can revise through editing—that is the next step in the process.

• C.G: The sculpture Encounter – Looking into Sewing (1998–2011) is also a part of your show at Kunsthal 44 Møen. In this work a mannequin, beneath layers of fabric, stands in for a body. Can you tell me about your concept, what happens when this work is looked “into”?

• K: It originated with an installation I made in the Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, 1998, for the exhibition Echolot, also curated by René Block. I conceived the work as a performance, but without any performing. An immobile mannequin was fully covered with used Korean bedcovers, and I documented the performative actions made by the audiences, who tried to locate the covered figure. Thus, a visible and invisible interaction is happening, peeling off the fabric by looking. I consider this “invisible sewing.”
  I wanted to create a tension between the audience and the ambiguous figure, the sculptural object. The audience looked at this figure waiting for a performance—but of course there was no movement. I used the immobile figure as a performer for the first time, before using my own body, without planning, A Needle Woman performance at that time, so the audience members themselves become the performers, through their own curiosity and reactions.
  This piece is one of the earliest manifestations of the ideas that led to A Needle Woman. It’s a fundamental moment: a strange encounter occurs between the figure and the audience, marked by this intense gaze.

• A woman stands on the street, immersed amid a torrent of passersby, utterly motionless -- a needle sewing through the fabric of humanity. With a simple, stoic gesture, Kimsooja vividly embodies the struggle to preserve a place for the individual within society, using her body as a conduit for critical questioning. This struggle is a perennial one, but by situating herself in an array of urban centers that span the planet, she imbues it with the tenor of contemporaneity: for if there is a single experience that can be said to exemplify the urgent conditions of today's world, it is the state of being engulfed by the "global city."

• This first version of A Needle Woman was created between 1999 and 2001. Approximately six years later, a silent but momentous event occurred: For the first time in history, the world's urban populace outnumbered the rural one. [1] Over the last 30 years, urban populations have reached staggering proportions, and their rates of growth are accelerating exponentially. In 1900, only 10% of the world's population lived in cities. Today the figure has climbed above 50%; by 2050, it will represent three-fourths of humanity. [2]

• A Needle Woman was produced just as the full realization of this explosion of urbanization reached a fever pitch, spilling across a variety of academic disciplines as well as art and popular media. The work is particularly emblematic of the directness with which the phenomenon tended to be addressed at the turn of the new millennium. With the benefit of a little more than ten years' hindsight, it is all the more striking for how it remains relevant to the discourse that developed in the wake of those confrontations.

• One of the most important of these discursive evolutions involves the way in which urbanism has grafted onto globalization studies. It was the rise of mega-cities throughout the world that made it no longer necessary to abstractly theorize that globalization is happening. Indeed, urbanization is increasingly seen not as an after-effect of globalization, but as its primary driving force. [3] Over the last three or four decades, the increased number and scale of cities capable of participating in the production and management of global flows of goods and capital have led to a vast expansion of those same flows. At the same time, they have produced significant populations of middle-class, cosmopolitan individuals, while mobilizing large numbers of migrant workers from the countryside as well as immigrants from poorer places. The result has been the development of cities bearing unprecedented levels of heterogeneity. The urbanization of the globe has turned out to be inseparable from the globalization of the urban.

• The nuance and poetry with which A Needle Woman captures these complex dynamics belies the precision with which it communicates meaning. This is especially so with respect to the artist's deliberate selection of the eight sites that "pass through" the anonymous, solitary figure. The academic literature on global urbanism provides a useful entry point (one of many) through which to access the implications that arise from this particular grouping of cities. Viewed in this light, the work bears a particularly strong resonance with an important theoretical framework known as the "global city" paradigm, as well as with the critiques to which it has been subjected. Originally advanced by the urban scholar Saskia Sassen in the 1990s, this approach focuses on how specific urban centers interface with and influence the world economy, using a series of measures such as monetary exchanges, volume of trade, and the number of transnational corporations based in a given urban zone as a way of quantifying its degree of "structural relevance" within a hierarchy of cities. From this perspective, the inclusion of New York, London, and Tokyo in A Needle Woman would serve to represent the traditional command centers of the global economy. Shanghai would serve to indicate the elite class of ascendant hubs that have established themselves more recently as major financial players. Mexico City, Delhi, and Cairo might stand for the crucial "second-" and "third-tier" cities that have also managed to lay a significant claim on the global financial sphere, though at a lower level.

• While there can be no doubt that the "global city" rubric has produced invaluable insights, in its earliest manifestations it met with heated criticism, especially from the direction of the "Global South" -- that is, from beyond Europe and North America. [4] By prioritizing economic criteria, the methodology involved in this concept had the effect of placing limits on the types of questions that were asked. Indeed, by reducing a city's relevance to its contribution to the world's financial system, it had the effect of focusing the attention of researchers onto a limited number of cities -- perhaps 30 or 40, all but three or four of them in the developed world. Advocates of these critiques also remind us of the importance of more grounded and culturally oriented lines of investigation through which we might uncover valuable means for improving city life -- from the creative productions of Rio's favela architecture, to the vibrant informal economies of Mumbai, to the socially cohesive effects of local popular culture in Kinshasa.

• With this debate as backdrop, A Needle Woman delivers a keen insight through the inclusion of an eighth site that paradigmatically represents the reverse side of the forces of global urban change: With a population that has escalated from 300,000 in 1950 to one that is estimated to top 23 million inhabitants by 2015, the city-region of Lagos exemplifies the lot of urban agglomerations that have witnessed astonishing growth in the context of severe poverty. [5]

• In human terms, mass urbanization has had its most powerful effects in the poorest parts of the world. Here again, the rate of the transformations is staggering: Today, about 70% of city dwellers live in developing countries, compared with less than 50% in 1970; by 2030, roughly four out of five urbanites will reside in the developing world. With much of this growth playing out against city infrastructures that remain ill-equipped to handle such expansion, unprecedented numbers have come to inhabit what are typically described as "slums." In the least developed countries, the proportion of slum residents approaches 80% of the populace; already, this figure represents one-third of the total global urban population. [6] While it is important to resist the chronic tendency to reduce the complexity of informal settlements to a single, homogenized vision of Dickensian bleakness, it is difficult not to read such mind-boggling statistics without being struck by the sense that we are in the midst of a crisis.

• In the face of these and other challenges, a pressing need has arisen to focus at least as much energy on understanding the specific and differentiated local repercussions of globalization as on identifying the resonant scenarios that it creates throughout the world. It has become vitally important, in other words, to survey this global age from the level of the street, the neighborhood, the city, where we may hope to find concrete ways both to maximize its potentials and to mitigate its most distressing symptoms.

• It is precisely in this sense that A Needle Woman seems so well attuned to the exigencies of the global-urban era. The figure that appears in these images confronts head-on the fearsome power of the contemporary city. At the same time, through her stillness, she expresses the possibility of making peace with it. It is worth paying attention to the mixture of resoluteness and humanism with which she looks forward to the volatile century that stretches out before us.

• The modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world – in other words – expressing the energy, the motion and the other inner forces.. ..the modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating. [1] — Jackson Pollock

• In the preface to the second edition of his collection of poems "Lyrical Ballads" William Wordsworth asks a simple yet crucial question "What is a Poet?" The answer he gives is probably the most truthful ever given: "He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man […] who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe[.] [2]

• Kimsooja's work as an artist is constant proof that she perfectly embodies Wordsworth's definition of a Poet. At the core of her production there is always a physical and at the same time metaphysical confrontation between the "spirit of life" that is in her and the "spirit of life" of the world surrounding her. Ultimately, her art is the result of using her body, the shell of her "comprehensive soul", to achieve a balance in the connection of inner and outer life. To quote Kimsooja's own words, her body is the "medium, mystery, hermaphrodite, abstraction, barometer, and shaman" [3] uniting her with the essence of the world. It is charged with and releases spiritual power. All her works, from 2727 kilometres Bottari Truck (1997) to A Needle Woman (1999-2001, 2005), from A Beggar Woman (2000-2001) to A Mirror Woman: The Sun & The Moon (2008), to mention just a few, are the visualization of this flow of energy.

• Even when Kimsooja is not physically present in the work on display in the gallery space, the reality that she offers the viewers is not a mere representation of a given natural phenomenon. It is the result of an interaction between two parts, of an exchange of energies. Her words about that production in which she is not in the frame – "When I disappear, I represent the act of nature more closely. Thus only my gaze becomes active" [4] – are self-explanatory. The objective of the video camera recording Nature is not a mechanical substitute of her eyes or an extension of her body. It is the activator of the gaze, an active participant in the process of capturing the flow of energy running in both directions between the artist and the outside world. It acts like that needle that for the first time made her sense a strong and inexplicable force emanating from her whole body when she was still a child and was helping her mother sewing together different pieces of fabric into a blanket cover. The absence of her body in the final composition of the projected images does not mean that Kimsooja was there, but she is not there any longer. Kimsooja is still there. To a certain extent, her videos are visual correspondents of what a "trace" is in Jacques Derrida's linguistic studies, that is a "mark of the absence of a presence, an always-already absent present" [5] .

• The Earth – Water – Fire – Air project, started in 2009, is one of those instances in which Kimsooja's body is not visible in the exhibited images. Natural phenomena, or "Beautiful and permanent forms of nature" – the "Lyrical Ballads" once again – are its main "subjects". In the specific, they are video recordings taken on the island of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands and in Guatemala – volcanic landscapes with incandescent lava, the restless sea, millenarian rocks sculptured by time, clouds of pure white on a clear blue sky. The four basic elements essential to both Eastern and Western thought as the basics of life in the Universe are not presented as single units, each of which is independent and isolated from each other. On the contrary, as suggested by the titles of the videos [6] , they are shown in binary combinations, interacting one with the other, flowing one into the other, the same way as the artist did with the space surrounding her when she recorded those images. Clearly, viewers can fully feel the strength of this energy when inside the space where the work – an eight-channel video installation in its current form – is exhibited. Without any doubts, Earth – Water – Fire – Air is first of all a work that has to be experienced. The intensity of the bond between the artist and the visible objects that she captured with the help of her camera is perceived in the gallery space where viewers are free to move around and use their senses to take in the energy coming out from the screens.

• It is by experiencing the work as an installation that any possible references to Beauty suggested by the incontestable magnificence of the natural spectacles lose their validity. Beauty is not a keyword here. Surely, a more appropriate approach would be through the concept of the Sublime in aesthetics. To be more precise, the way the Sublime was perceived by the Neo-Kantian school of the beginning of the 20th century according to which the feelings of fear and horror – fundamental qualities for the 18th and 19th centuries (Edmund Burke and the English Romantics, amongst others) – were replaced by a sense of contentment and safety before an object of superior force.

• Kimsooja stands with her video camera in front of an object of "superior force". The moment she presses the rec button, like a needle piercing a piece of cloth, her "superior force" starts to interact with that of Nature before her. The energy of the exchange is very strong and overwhelming. However, the effect reached – Earth, Water, Fire, and Air displayed in the exhibition space – is indisputably one of ease and wellbeing. Her works are never a methodical process of "quoting" from Nature, simply because Kimsooja is not a passive receiver. The segment called "Fire of Air" can serve as a proof of the artist's dialoguing with Nature. In it, while being driven she operates a spotlight to break the darkness of the night and illuminate the rocky fields of the landscape. Here, she in charge of what can be seen and what stays wrapped in darkness. Because of this constant dialoguing, none of the images offered to the viewers can ever be, to quote Wordsworth again, a "soulless image on the eye" [7] , a mere visual impression on the retina of the spectator. On the other hand, Kimsooja sublimates the etymological meaning of the word "video", that is "I see", first person of the present tense of videre (to see). She invests it with both spiritual and lyrical power. Simply, albeit roughly, put, it is poetry camouflaged as science.

• As an artist Kimsooja's possess the unique ability to turn the chaos of energy exchanging during the time of performing or recording – that "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" [8] between the Poet and Nature – into a sense of tranquility and calmness for the viewers. Accordingly, the screens framing the videos lose their boundaries and a distinct feeling of oneness with Nature is strongly felt. To a certain degree, the genesis of Earth – Water – Fire – Air is not that dissimilar to that of Jackson Pollock's canvases. It is the same intensity of human artistic energy – albeit different in nature. Obviously, the outcome is at the antipodes. Kimsooja's is a calm chaos generated by the maturity of the passions of the artist's heart. And it is this proven maturity that, paraphrasing Pollock when he was asked if he worked from Nature, allows to state that Earth – Water – Fire – Air proves once and for all that Kimsooja is Nature.

• Kim Soo-Ja is her full name, but she introduces herself in her web page as Kimsooja (Korea, 1957) with her own manifesto: In "A One-Word Name Is An Anarchist's Name" (2003), Kimsooja refuses gender identity, marital status, socio-political or cultural and geographical identity by not separating the family name and the first name. In this same way – without an identity or with an almost ephemeral one – she has been developing since 1992 her singular and poetic work that includes videos, performances, installations, site-specific projects and photographs.

• To give rise to her work, Kimsooja travels to different cities, villages and small towns in search of diverse cultures. It is a pilgrimage with bottaris – Korean word that means "wrapping luggage with a wrapping cloth", the easiest and most functional way of carrying one's belongings– sometimes walking and others by truck; a nomadism that speaks about civilizations, traditions, and languages that shall be faced in the new crossing.

• The art that she creates becomes ceremonial. She looks through her own past, present and future and through that contemplation the questions and discourses on time and space emerge. This way, Kimsooja links her work to nature and the relation with others. In her pieces the viewers are engulfed by the multiple perspectives introduced by the artist and they can participate of it lively.

• Textiles are the media that Kimsooja chooses to develop her maps of beliefs. Despite her origins where there always existed a need of experimenting different types of media similar to fabrics, sewing became the wisest and most accurate tool. It allowed her to combine her questionings and the relation between the "I" and the "Other" over the canvas surface. Thereby, the separation between the artist and the surface disappears and transforms into a healing joint.

• Bottaris are probably the most distinctive element in Kimsooja's art. They hold not only references to the migration of her land but also to the essence of all her work: mankind. "I've always been fascinated by nomadic minorities' life style and their rich visual culture and originality. During my youth my family also lived a nomadic life due to my father's job, although within Korea. I wasn't aware of the fact that my family had been wrapping and unwrapping bottaris all the time until I started Cities on the Move–2727 km Bottari Truck in 1997", she explains.

• Kimsooja's bottaris are sculptural pieces. Viewers can open, touch and examine them. The artist acts as an intermediary between the owners of those clothes and old bedspreads and the observers. As they make contact with the bottaris, they embark on their own journey imagining who used these fabrics before. This way, the pieces transcend the Eastern tradition and the historical codes that were associated to them; they become channels which redefine the concept of the object. Here it doesn't matter if Kimsooja re-makes and re-contextualizes a ready-made but the way she chooses to look at her past and the transition that Korea lived from a traditional lifestyle to a modern one.

• A Needle Woman, A Beggar Woman and A Homeless Woman are the most developed and delicate performances by Kimsooja. In them, she appears with a singular hieratic posture amongst a crowd in continuous flow that walks towards and by her sometimes observing and others questioning themselves the truth of her static stance. Anonymous and with neutral clothing, she achieves to interfere with the canons and flux of the city with one unique message: temper and truth.

• The patience and austerity that the artist uses to introduce folklore and daily habits of Asian and Latin-American cultures in her videos is what lets her bonds so closely to their respective traditions. Each folkloric practice that Kimsooja discovers works as a talisman. First she researches the origins and encounters of the culture and then she charges herself with figures of power.

• The spectrum and repetition which Kimsooja works with in her videos is expressed by the cities in move, in an action loop. In Thread Routes (Chapter 1. Peru) – a video that captures the routes of the threading women in Peru –, women weave again and again the colorful embroideries of their origins where generations and spiritual experiences are combined together. Mumbai: A Laundry Field was filmed in India where men shake, drain and strain against the stones the symphony of tonalities of their clothes. They are the representation of time, an intangible and unapproachable mental space, never planned.

• "When it comes to the performative video pieces such as A Needle Woman performance series, I just had a strong desire to do a performative piece but didn't know what exactly it would be, even until the moment I started filming", Kimsooja says. That is the main reason why intuition plays such an important role in the process and meaning of her work. She rises as a medium woman, as an ethnographic canal that lets the world see the most pure forms of art. A reader of the visible and invisible worlds given by nature.

• These projects have turned Kimsooja into one of most renowned and interesting artists from the international contemporary panorama. She lives and works in New York, and has exhibited her projects and artworks all around the world. Among them latest ones we can name NPPAP - Yong Gwang Nuclear Power Plant Art Project, commissioned by The National Museum of Contemporary Art (2010), Earth – Water – Fire – Air, Hermes (2009), Kimsooja, Baltic Center (2009) and Lotus: Zone of Zero, BOZAR, Brussels (2008), as well as other emblematic ones like Artempo: where time becomes art (2007) presented at the Venice Biennale, Cities on the Move (1997-2000) and Traditions/Tensions (1996-1998), and the participation in other biennales like Moscow (2009), Whitney Biennial (2002), Lyon (2000), São Paulo (1998), to name some.

• Kimsooja has been working for two years on a series of a 16 mm film project called Thread Routes. She has completed the Peruvian chapter on weaving culture and the European chapter on lace making is being developed. The project about origins of textile culture includes India, Mali, China, and Native America.

• From blue to violet. The nine minutes of To Breathe: Invisible Mirror/Invisible Needle involve a lifecycle of the color spectrum, an electronic spiritual autobiography of red-yellow-blue sanctified at the four hard edges of the screen. These are colors that command, rather than pacify, the eye; the problem, to borrow Duchamp's phrase, of being "up to the neck in the retina," here becomes a compelling visual solution, an optical tease with metaphysical consequences. "My motivation for creating this piece was to question the depth of the surface," Kimsooja has said. "Where is the surface? What in the world is there between things?"

• These migrating color fields, these on-screen anti-surfaces, frustrate the eye, if only temporarily; the effort here is to re-educate our visual intelligence, to make the eye more buoyant, less habituated. What Kimsooja calls her interest in in-betweens – in those enigmatic medial spaces that can be intuited but never experienced simultaneously – gives this work its itinerant sensibility, and it is this skepticism of the surface that disaffiliates To Breathe from a mid-twentieth-century aesthetics apotheosized by Barnett Newman, Ellsworth Kelly, Anne Truitt, Robert Ryman, etc. A more suitable list of aesthetic influences might include: magic lantern shows, Stan Brakhage films, Technicolor, stained glass windows, and also Cézanne, whose attraction to what he called "the meeting of planes in the sunlight" might describe another visual corollary to this work: the sensation, the flicker of colors, produced when staring at the sun with one's closed.

• The two channels. The inhale-exhale component of the soundtrack forms its metrical unit: the couplet. The rhyming of inhale and exhale is made possible by an activity (breathing) which, in this instance, becomes increasingly less agile, more labored and urgent. Once the last exhale is replaced by the low, monophonic sound of humming, however, we assume that a change in condition has taken place, that a transaction between physical and spiritual experience has culminated in repose. And yet, Kimsooja's colors continue their gestation; the juxtaposition of an uninterrupted, trifurcated human hum and an image with no reliable surface and no discernable visual plane is the technique of a stereoscopic aesthetics. The effort is toward two radically dissociated channels of information that cannot be unified by the eye alone, but that require a bit of imaginative thinking and mental ingenuity to grant their coalescence.

• But to think imaginatively entails a sensorial leap of faith and a transfiguration of the commonplace that often feels peculiar and difficult, but that is also necessarily clarifying and inventive. Hence the statement by Kimsooja: "I don't believe in creating something new but in inventing new perspectives based on mundane daily life." The result plays like an ecstatic vision; a flash of light and sound that transforms Duchamp's "retinal element" into an instrument – a needle to thread and combine, a mirror to duplicate and rhyme – for achieving the movement from surface to spirit.

I. Intro

• This project is planned as an experiment, which introduces new arrangement from a deviated and strayed viewpoint, rather than unilaterally maintaining fixed conceptions. The Project Room, starting from the appearance of warehouse, or 'preparatory warehouse', reveals various aspects, such as 'underground - isolation from natural light'; 'concrete' wall, revealing its raw material; 'properties of road - passages and intersections.' As previous exhibition[1] showed the possibility of the Project Room as an exhibition hall, this exhibition is the result of the finding that the very aspects of the Project Room can be a main stem of a project.

• The original form of the Project Room was composed of just eighteen columns connecting the ceiling and the floor. To make it an exhibition hall, walls were made between columns and six new ones were added, which form a skeletal space of 'passage_road' and 'intersections_center.' This basic form, which is isolated from natural light, has advantages of not only playing a basic role as an exhibition hall, but also effectively installing and producing works which utilize effects of light and the luminous intensity. Each section seen from 'intersection_center' is over six meters in width. It provides various criterion of space production and enables experimental and genre-integrating project such as concert, performance and films to be planned.
  Therefore the plan for the Project Room will be to make programs which will be able to emit 'indiscriminate' energy by concentrating on finding experimental local art, young art, and various genre related with space interpretation, as well as utilizing the characteristic form of the space.

• This exhibition aims to introduce a 'video series' that is conceived as a work from the start for dense space interpretation and introduction of the work. So we invited Kimsooja(1957), a world renowned artist born in Daegu, and researched her video works, which have been exhibited as projects, to choose a work which not only reveals kim's proper color but also flexibly fit into the direction of interpretation on the Project Room. In this process, we start from reading the structure of intersection (cross) of the Project Room, and then we begin to imagine, during continuous discussion, the structure of symmetric labyrinth as a variant of the structure of passage. Each video, planned for a project, is placed on various screens, which is located on the designed line of flow, rather than arranged according to the established way of installation. It is the moment when the meaning of space is positively expanded through the integration of the work and the space into a work of installation. In this project, Kimsooja's representative work, <A Needle Woman(2005)>, which takes as its stages symbolic sites of religious conflict, poverty, international isolation, civil war occurring worldwide, provided the core of this research and the criterion of thinking.

• This work, composed of six pieces, extended time through slow playing and was arranged on a wall side by side in a form of embodying the figure life-size. The artist's body as an axis of time mediates spectators with the world, and the spectators are cognitively able to experience the gap of time by borrowing the artist's body. In other words, it was intended to reflect the problem of the universality and the substance of mankind which persists after making the elements of trouble in each city naturally and psychologically resolve through this cognitive process.
  This exhibition was devised so as to expand the experience of the meaning of the work through the space interpretation, all without losing the existing intention. Therefore the road structure of this space plays a primary role of setting a physical distance for appreciation, and the line of flow leads a kind of practice walking that is a walking from work to work while connecting them. We intended psychological distance for thinking for spectators to concentrate on the work through this process, and we placed on six screens, three kinds in their size, peculiar cognitive experience in which we can recognize the artist's body as medium, aiming at more dramatic effect. At last, spectators who arrive at the last work on the line of flow go beyond being mere spectators, becoming agents who participate in the exhibition and are able to have their own trace of thinking of the work.

• At the stage of researching the works of kimsooja, organizing articles also functions as a keyword constituting the core of this project. We selected articles - first, contextualizing kimsooja's entire work for a systematic understanding[2]; second, conceiving appropriate application and interpretation of [3]>, which is frequently mentioned with regard to kimsooja's works; third, dealing with a perspective on the meditation and memory as a starting point of 'archetypal' thinking[4]; and, finally a referential article, comparatively analyzing shamanism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism in East Asia with regard to cultural archetypes[5] - to provide various humanistic perspectives for the significance of kimsooja and her work.

II. Connecting : From Universal Space to 'Symmetric and Delusive' Space

• 'Universal Space', a widely used architectural concept, is a starting point where we decide the direction and the standard of this project. It provides a starting point for a conscious foundation which enables the form of space to be transformed, in that simplicity and changeability of space, which is applicable to any use, let the energy, which variously visualizes the space itself, emitted. It is also a clue to imagining 'labyrinthine structure' which overcomes the existing 'passage-road' structure, a biased element would have functioned as a restriction.[6] In other words, we imagine 'universal space' in the solidity and rigidity of basic framework and decisively transform the meaning of 'passage_road' into 'labyrinth' to expand and develop the unique interface. Of course, the structure of labyrinth intend to remind us of its symmetric form and to produce a line of flow as traces rather than a maze or a wayfinding. Video works are running on screens which are placed in each dead end and vary in size, 2.4m, 3.9m and 6.8m each. Because of the mood emitted from these works, spectators may have an illusionary experience that they feel like walking into the video image while identifying themselves with Kimsooja whose back faces us. It is a kind of figurative infiltration of the role of 'labyrinth' into the ingenious unity made of the labyrinthine structure of the space and video works.

A Needle Woman, Archetypal Consciousness as Sentiment and Nullification

• Having shown the inherited cultural memory and the flow of her inner necessity through the act of sewing and working with fabric and bottari while plunging herself into the world, Kimsooja now transforms her meditative thinking of the awareness of nature and universal value into action, concentrating on the relation between things and herself, and between human and nature and human relationships. Here, the body of the artist as a medium becomes a vanishing point of perspective and relation, deriving a certain resonance which visualizes the form of performance.

• Backdrops of <A Needle Woman(2005)> are Patan (Nepal), Havana (Cuba), Jerusalem (Israel), Sana'a (Yemen), Rio de Janero (Brazil), N¡¯Djamena (Chad in Central Africa). <A Needle Woman(1999-2001)> is a kind of sacred ritual in which she is aware of her 'body' as a 'needle' passing through people crowded in major metropolises, naming herself 'a needle woman'. <A Needle Woman(2005)> provides a wider room to interpret the problem of 'relation' from the perspectives of comparative culture, sociology and humanities, in that it approaches sites which symbolize conflict over international interests and paradoxical oppositions that remain unresolved.

• Chad(N¡¯Djamena) is a representative post-colonial country which has been suffering from a civil war between Islam and Christianity for over 30 years, all within a structure that precluded independent and autonomous social development. Nepal(Patan), despite its status as a cultural sanctuary, is still laden with the anxiety of a civil war triggered and prolonged by the ideological discord and internal troubles in the country's leadership. Yemen(Sana'a) is the site of extreme opposition between Islamic fundamentalism (North Yemen) and separatism (South Yemen), and Rio de Janiero (Brazil) has long been called the gang's empire, a city full of crime, poverty and violence. Jerusalem (Israel) shows the absence of communication and extreme opposition against the Islamic society, and Havana (Cuba) symbolizes post-colonial ideology and the isolation from international society, an act led by U.S.A. Poverty is still widespread in these countries because of the structural contradiction of society, spurred by solid imperialistic violence and discriminated accommodation of the differences of ideologies and religions, perpetuating an anxiety of hostility.
  Kimsooja's perspective of seeing 'relation' here is sentimental. Act of enduring pain is to prove the pain by plunging into the painful reality regardless of ideologic category. Kimsooja doesn't represent dramatic moment of the situation, or journalistic viewpoint. She just encounters people who are living in the site where life goes on anyway. Though aware of the impoverishment in 'pseudo-death'-like reality, they carry on with the weariness of life. Her act of being a medium, a kind of monument for mankind, does not attempt any dichotomous valuation, but acts as a sea embracing everything. It penetrates what she intended in works such as <sewing into walking(1995)>, paying a tribute to the memory of the victims of the Gwangju massacre; <d'apertutto or Bottari Truck in Exile(1999)>, a tribute to the victims of the Kosovo civil war; <Planted Names(2002)>, an installation in which names of black people who are victimized in plantations of South Carolina, are inscribed.
  Measuring the sentiment with the memory of 'the site' in the act of connecting 'the site' with the 'self'. The act of embracing, seeking for reconciliation, and bringing human value back to life through the spiritual cure.

• Existing works, showing forms of leaving and staying, were a process of meditation on her cultural memory through 'being' in the world, and bottari, symbolizing this process, became a cause of the modifier 'nomadism' which repeatedly appears in the discussions of her works. <A Needle Woman(2005)> is "always open to strange lives, strange worlds and strangers,[...]it brings forth new differences within itself through strangers"[7] and embodies the root of relation in the commonsensical mechanism of nomadism that is inherent in the act of approaching cities of anxiety and distrust. Additionally, if we can say that this interpretation is related to the process of defining agent by the otherness bringing forth new differences, this should be explicated from the perspective of kimsooja's attitude. This attitude is not irrelevant to the process of defining herself while facing the world as medium or a kind of messenger.

• A 'needle', consistent in the context of the artist's attitude, becomes a symbol which dramatically builds a sense of unity with the other through the disappearance of the self.
  "A needle disappears from the place, just leaving the marks of the stitch after accomplishing its role as a medium of sewing fabric[...]At the moment when spectators are not aware of my body, they wear it and stand in my position. This is not different from the property of needle."_kimsooja

• The body of the artist, a personified needle, is a mere medium, or what is intended to be erased. For a medium implies the existential limit that it should rely on phenomena, it may seem that there isn't any necessity, substance and root in itself.[8] If it is a contextualized element in kimsooja's persisting attitude, we need to understand 'the erasure of body' not as disappearing or finishing its role, but as fulfilling its role.

• Art is an embodied voice of life, 'pure crystal' of existing consciousness, that speaks when it is located in its body or in the system of society or nation.[9]

• It is an act that starts with a zen-like awareness of the relation between the self and things, the self and the world, then plunging the self into particular circumstances. An individual acquires the meaning of its existence by awareness of its being in 'common existence.' The needle woman performance is a sort of self christening to the world. This christening is an act of perceiving and having others perceived the situation as a necessary occasion to select and arrange a possibility from all possibilities, and a symbolic mechanism to justify her act by properties of 'needle' which are hurting and curing. It makes us consider the other side of consciousness which determines an attitude.

• Once again the category of 'relation' goes back to the self and things (sewing, bottari), human and human , body and nature, and elements of nature <Earth, Water, Fire, Air>. Then the consciousness of the artist becomes the beginning and end that carries such ruminations, and in this beginning and end, the body becomes the mediator that acts as a barometer of the world. The artist probes self-recognition to proceed to trace the world and elements of the world, and this process can be compared to a kind of 'trance' which we necessarily encounter in the desperate request for self-salvation," seeking for a methodology to satisfy everyone in front of the endlessly challenging surface, paradox of self-existence, or strong desire for originality."[10] This pattern appears in the early works where, "[i]n the quotidian act of tacking up bed sheets, I experienced an intimate yet wonderful sense of unity of my thoughts, sensibilities and actions. I found the possibility to contain such abundance of memory and pain, even the affection for life in that unity"[11], as well as in the first stage of .[12] It is a starting point of her entire works which have passed through the act of sewing and the act of wrapping(bottari) and finally accomplished in the act of wandering.
  In such an experience which is a starting point of works, she was urgent. Every urgentness is replaced with symbolic death. At least, if the will to live is a human nature, it desires a possibility to cure a lack and anxiety and to live. It is an instinct to find a spiritual origin on which the will to live is able to rely beyond the painful routine and reality.
  If not to the routine, then our thought may be cast back to mythic inspiration which is the spiritual origin, to 'cultural archetype' which makes the proof of reality reflected by unusual things reminded. The objet of work sometimes speaks of something located behind the act of the artist, or cultural memory which forms category or cultural archetype which the universal can comprehend. Of course it also has singularities such as geographical environment, species or generation, but we can find in these singularities inherited common terms that concern the formation of society, conflict and reconciliation which are handed down and acquired, and myth, religion, and knowledge, begotten by intelligence and sentiment.
  The process in which the artist has expanded the meaning of 'relation' to elements of nature, is to pull out 'the will to live' as pure crystal or nature which always exist in 'common term.' Therefore, a consciousness, which presupposes this process, cannot but desire the 'archetypal thought' of culture and 'reflections on memories'.

• The urgentness of agony and symbolic death needs the occasion of 'resurrection'. A 'trance' or 'realization of an occult way' as a passage ritual lets us imagine an element of shaman. Shamans, who "begin their new true life by separation, or by spiritual crisis which is sufficiently permeated in the tragic greatness and beauty",[13] cure diseases and leave achievement as an ascetic. Additionally, they take roles of "a guide of soul, a priest, a mystic as well as a poem."[14] Their ultimate end is to mediate supernatural beings and humans. Great artists and scholars surely took a role as messengers for the understanding of the world. They found the connection to the new world from their unique identity and pioneered the way to the new intuition through the cognitive amplification of conceptual thinking. They were seeking for self-love and awareness, and then marching to the world with this spiritual arms. For them, being in the world is not simple 'being' but 'being' chosen by themselves. And they embrace the necessity of act through self-awareness. Now we may need and focus on the artist who expands our world with the significance of shaman. An agent who cuts across and connects the world through self-reflection and doubt, which are substantial for an artist, and memory and archetypal thought. This should be a modifier for kimsooja who is standing in the same course as a shaman.

• Kimsooja always wears achromatic(black) clothes. Achromatic color is a symbol of anarchist, but also, on the other hand, it reminds one of 'Black(玄色)' which is considered the root of all colors in Eastern culture. Like a shaman who mediates transcendental world on the base of principle of yin, yang, and five elements, a philosophy of color, spiritually inherited from this world view, is composed of five pure colors(五方正色), 'blue, red, yellow, white, black'. Five pure colors were used for the bed sheet or fabrics of bottari, which were the main material of kimsooja's existing works, and these fabrics are objets which symbolized the archetypality traditionally accompanies our life from birth to death. This is the ground of the reason that the artist's objet is interpreted not as simple 'readymade' but as 'readyused' having cultural code.[15] However, Black(玄色) is made from blending of all colors, and it is considered 'chaos before distinction"[16] and 'root of all color'. It is another name of 'truth(道)' and another body which encounters 'every poverty' while wrapping the artist's body.[17]

• You see nature’s landscapes as they are, unscathed by civilization; and the mingling of water, fire and air in volcano strata. They are the moments of the beginnings of the universe, and at the same time, aged appearances of the aeons of endurance. We realize we cannot fathom the age of nature, because nature is not a “paused” scene; it is a living organ- ism that ceaselessly flows and changes in and out of different states and forms. Nature as we perceive with our senses, and a mystical world beyond such sensory perceptions, are in fact adjacent to each other; and from this, the artist explores the meaning of “Earth-Water-Fire-Air”.
  This is Kimsooja’s first exhibition show back in her home country since 2000 at Rodin Gallery. What is being exhibited – these site-specific installations – are some of the most essential focal points that she has dealt with while she travelled extensively for 10 years and carried out many different art pro- jects. Strangely enough, in contrary to her epithet, <Bottari [1] Artist>, the current installation does not contain any of her gaudy trademark bottari cloth, crowds of people, nor the back of herself – what the artist has explained to be the vanishing point of her ego. Instead, scenes from nature are presented. They are something strange, undecipherable; they are squirming underneath a surface. Many con- temporary artists nowadays deal with issues of the urban lifestyle, the fragmented identities, social relationships arising from them and their antimonies working against them. But what Kimsooja pays attention is instead ancient nature, and furthermore, the basic elements comprising the nature, both of which are far off the mark of the context of con- temporary art. She has shown a compassionate gaze at these aspects of contemporaneous life before, but this time, she sheds a new light on such life through the primary elements of nature; and they are always seemingly standing on the opposite of our lives. It would not be inadequate to interpret that the psychic energy that the artist felt when she sewed goes hand in hand with nature’s earth, water, fire and air. We find a consistent flow that passes from life to nature and the consequent collusion of the two.
  One day in 1983, university painting major Kimsooja was sewing together with her mother duvet cover onto the mattress [2] when she all of a sudden felt a moment so special that she has cherished it all her life. At the moment when the needle poked through the duvet cover, some kind of electric energy from the tip of the needle penetrated and pervaded through her entire body. What could be called a dramatic encounter with the needle was in fact the passage to the answer to the question on the surface of the canvas that Kimsooja was looking for: it was the answer to the depth and structure of the surface, the world, and the void beyond it. In her early sewing pieces and Deductive Object Series, she mostly made use of sewing and wrapping fabrics around the objects that conveyed verticality of the needle upon the horizontal flatness of the fabric and the structure of the objects. She tries to find structure and the underside of it by the symbolic action of sewing: her artwork, Sewing Into Walking, adopted her ‘walking’ to places; whereas in , she became the ‘needle’ as she stands still against the wave of people walking towards her; faces nature, with her back to the viewer. She says that she turns herself over as a needle between one person and another, between people and nature, mediating between them as her own body becomes the “vanishing point” of it all. What this means is that when the needles disappears behind the fabric, it is as if she, the medium for relationships and communication, vanishes into people and nature, and subsequently because she has her back to the viewers, she becomes the “avatar of the others”, resulting in the extinction of the self and identity.
  The artist further developed her theme, which is the unification with the others by the dissolution of the self, by the use of mirrors, objects that are of equal symbolic importance to needles. Her needle works focused upon the structure of human relations and their healing via stitching, while mirrors, through the mechanism of reflection, would momentously lead her to deal with the nature that is opposite side to the humans. The first time she used a mirror was in the 1999 Venice Biennale. At the end of the Arsenale, there standing still was a truck loaded full of bottari; and in front of the truck, she installed a large mirror and in turn created an imaginary road that the truck can drive onto, and at the same time, exuded the ambience of space being wrapped around with something. In 2002, she started the Series. Just as the mirror cannot be reflected by itself, so she also cannot find herself reflected upon mirrors, thus she identifies herself as an object of , just like the mirror. This is why she decided to eliminate the performative elements in her works ever since, and in their stead, created architectural space in which the viewers can rest and contemplate. The reconciliation of the duality – dealt with in the bottari and needle works – was intensified through the use of mirrors. Mirrors effectively reveals the antipodes of situation, concepts and people: the self and others, male and female, wrapping and unfolding, reality and fantasy, the material and metaphysical, The sun and the moon, yin and yang, inhaling and exhaling – all of which edge closer to the principles of nature. A recent video installation, The Sun and the Moon (2008), captures the image of the rays of both the sun and the moon reflecting upon the surface of the ocean during an eclipse; a phenomenon of harmonious overlap where the yin meets the yang.
  It is inevitable that after observing all the different types of human lives, civilizations and the beyond in the corners of the world, Kimsooja’s path found itself crossing nature’s fundamentals, that is, earth, water, fire and air. These four elements, including yin and yang, are the ‘rhizomes’ of the universe. They have been considered to be part of the 115 elements that made up the world since the Enlightenment Age; this is in conjunction to the philosophy of the Oriental, where it is believed that 5 elements are the most important make ups – gold, water, wood, fire and earth. In Buddhism, it is believed that earth, water, fire, wind and air are the roots. As the Western philosophical tradition explained in 6 BC by Empedocles, just like there are four seasons, four stages of life (childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age), or four directions (north, south, east and west), there are four spheres of material (earth, water, fire and air). The synthesis and exchange of the four indestructible and unchangeable elements are brought together through philia and neikos, that is, Love and Strife. This power relationship between energy and the material can be compared to the Oriental’s yin and yang. Moreover, this is also the story of eternal recurrence (ewige wiederkunft, Nietzsche), or Freud’s Eros and Thanatos, that hu- mans are driven by two conflicting central desires. Kimsooja’s brings her works under the spotlight: firstly, the place is where the material nature meets intimately with human nature. Secondly, she embraces and grasps human nature vis-à-vis nature as they are in fact, one.

• 보따리가 된 보자기는 김수자와 여행을 떠난다. 사실 한국의 보따리는 안으로는 포용과 감싸 안음인 동시에 외적으로는 배척과 경계를 동시에 상징한다. 따라서 보따리의 안은 내 식구지만 밖은 남이다. 하지만 그 안과 밖의 의미가 고정된 것은 아니다. 보따리를 푼다는 것은 정착과 안식을 뜻하는 정주를 의미하고 싼다는 것은 결별과 방랑을 의미하며 유목민의 삶을 의미한다. 하지만 모든 사람들은 정착하고자 하면서도 그 역마살을 어쩌지 못해 반복적으로 길을 떠나는 운명을 지니고 있다. 이런 보따리의 양면성은 김수자 작업의 키워드이자 핵심이다. 김수자는 보따리를 통해 일상과 예술을 때로는 동시에 때로는 분리하서 서로가 서로를 조명하기도 하고 조망하기도 한다. 이런 그의 보따리는 1997년부터 여행을 떠난다. 물론 그의 이런 유랑은 이미 1994년부터 시작되었다. 물론 1993년 <연역적 오브제-옷과 천>을 통해 자신의 신체와 옷감의 일체화를 실험했던 그는 퍼포먼스와 비디오 등으로 영역을 확장하면서 보따리의 영역을 넓혀나갔다. 이런 그의 행동은 보따리의 이중적 의미를 확인하거나 실천하기 위한 실험이자 실천이었다. 이듬해 그는 관훈 갤러리에서 개인전을 열면서 전시장 밖에 옷을 가득 싼 보따리를 적당하게 쌓아 외부로 나오더니 이후 경주 옥산서원 계곡에서 이불보를 헤쳐 계곡을 덮었다가 다시 보따리에 사는 퍼포먼스 <자연에 눕다.> (1994년 경주옥산서원계곡) 를 행하면서 전통과 자연이라는 절대적인 환경 속에서 보따리로 의미 지어지는 삶의 모습으로 보여주었다. 그리고 이 보따리는 경주의 양동마을의 고가에서 다시 민숙마을이라는 시간과 장소 속에 설치되어 작품화 한다. 이후 이런 자연과 일체를 이루는 설치와 행위는 다시 인천의 용유도 백사장에서 다시 환생한다. 이런 그의 일련의 작업들은 시간이 지난 후 돌이켜 보니 먼 길을 떠나기 전 천지신명께 길 떠나는 것을 고하며 안녕과 평안을 기원하는 제의식이 아니었을까하는 생각이 들기도 하다.

• 그의 이런 유랑벽은 어쩔 수 없는 것인지도 모른다. 대구에서 태어난 그는 군인으로 나라에 봉사했던 아버지를 따라 유랑(?)생활을 해야 했다. 대개 군인들은 일 년이나 2년 단위로 임지가 바뀌는 지라 그 가족들까지도 한 곳에 정착하기보다는 언제나 떠 날 준비를 하고 있어야 했다. 단촐 한 살림살이와 이부자리 두어 채를 이불보따리에 싸서 떠나면 그만이었다. 이렇게 쓸쓸한 유랑민의 가장 호사스러운 가재도구는 아마도 이불보가 아니었을까. 이불보의 그 처연한 아름다움은 짧은 시간이지만 사귀었던 친구들과의 이별을 의미하는 동시에 새로운 친구들에 대한 기대를 아울러 의미하기도 했다. 미지의 장소에 대한 두려움과 호기심이라는 보자기의 안과 밖 같은 이중적 구조는 김수자의 작품을 구성하는 중요한 분자이다. 이러한 그의 보자기는 (1995), (1996)로 이어지면서 이후 화려한 이불보들이 현란한 향연을 이루는 가운데 화려하지만 슬품이 묻어나오는 <Encounter - Looking into Sewing>(1998-2002)과 installation (2000), 그리고 2002년의 으로 이어지면서 놀라울 만큼의 일관성을 지닌 작품들로 우리를 놀라게 한다. 즉 그의 작업의 여정은 꾸준하게 천과 보따리의 다중적 의미와 그 의미 속에 관계되어지는 관계항으로서의 보따리 그리고 낮선 장소와 새로운 만남 속에서 빚어지는 긴장과 기대로 점철되어 있음을 보여준다.
  1990년대 중반부터 김수자는 본격적으로 그의 퍼포먼스를 단지 기록하는 것이 아닌 퍼포먼스와 비디오가 결합된 작품들을 실험하기 시작했다. 그의 첫 번째 비디오 작품은 아마도 수십 개 아니 수 백 개의 보따리를 트럭에 싣고 11일 동안 전국을 달리는 퍼포먼스를 기록한 작품이 아닐까 한다. <떠도는 도시들-보따리 트럭 2727킬로미터>라는 제목의 비디오 작품으로 세상에 모습을 드러낸 이 작품은 비디오 작품인 동시에 그의 퍼포먼스를 기록한 기록물로 그의 작품의 골간을 이루는 유랑(Nomad)이라는 개념의 집합이자 결산이기도 하다. 이 비디오 작품에서 작가는 보따리를 실은 화물차 짐칸에 마치 보따리처럼 함께 하고 있다. 작가는 자신의 뒷모습을 통해 자신을 드러내지 않은 채 보따리에 삶을 맡긴 익명의 사람들을 대신해서 그들과 여정을 같이한다. 그에게 있어 그의 몸은 움직이는 또 하나의 보따리이다. 사랑과 욕망, 겸손과 자만, 절제와 욕망, 채움과 비움, 편협과 포용, 이기심과 배려같은 상충된 모든 현상들이 천의 피부를 통해 안과 밖으로 갈라서는 접점에 그는 그들을 대신해서 자리하고 있다. 여기에 움직이는 트럭의 화물칸에서 마치 석고상처럼 움직임이 없는 작가의 뒷모습을 뒤로하면서 주변은 물처럼 흘러간다. 움직이는 것은 트럭일진데 마치 주변이 움직이는 것처럼 보이는 것은 과연 진실일까 아니면 착시현상일까. 이러한 비디오 작업은 <바늘여인>(1999~2001)이란 제목으로 이어진다. 수만의 인파가 지나가는 도쿄와 상하이, 뉴 델리, 뉴욕, 멕시코, 카이로, 라고스의 도심에서 인파에 아랑곳하지 않고 서있는 작가의 모습과 일본 기타쿠슈의 돌산위에 비스듬히 누워 안식을 취하는 작품에 이어 카이로와 멕시코와 라고스의 도로 위에서 보시를 요구하는 (2000~2001)과 뉴델리와 카이로에서 길에 작가자신이 길에 비스듬히 누워있는 (2001)과 델리의 바라나시로 유명한 야무르 강가 저편을 바라보고 있는 모습을 잡은 <A Laundry Woman - Yamuna River, India> (2000)로 이어진다. 그리고 2005년 베니스 비엔날레에 출품된 (2005)로 이어진다. 네팔의 파탄과 쿠바의 하바나, 리우 데 자네이로, 챠드의 은자메나, 예면의 사나와 예루살렘에서 예의 뒷모습을 보인 채 그들을 함께 걷기도 하지만 한편으로는 거슬러 올라가는 듯한 모습의 비디오를 통해 숭고한 역사와 시간의 견고함을 보여준다. 하지만 이들 도시가 갖는 노예무역이라는 치욕스러운 인간의 욕망과 휴머니티의 역사, 살육과 투쟁 그리고 역설적으로 평화라는 장소성과 역사성을 일깨워 주면서 아름다운 화면에 감추어진 인간의 욕망과 절제사이의 간극은 더욱 넓어지고 인간의 양면성에 대한 놀라움은 더욱 확대된다.

• 이런 그의 박애주의 또는 휴머니즘적 태도는 우리 어머니의 사랑과 희생과도 맥을 같이한다. 하지만 그의 이런 일련의 정치적인 사건이나 사회적인 문제에 작품으로 반응하는 것은 인간에 대한 배려와 사랑이다. 일부 비평가들은 그의 재료와 작업의 방식을 보고 거칠게 페미니스트로 그를 규정하지만 그는 작업을 통해 인간과 인간의 관계, 인간과 자연의 관계 그리고 그 사이에서 교감하고 소통하는 인간의 모습과 삶의 이야기를 담아낸다. 아픈 상처를 어루만지고 가해자도 마음의 상처를 입은 치유해야 할 피해자라는 입장과 불쌍하고 처참하게 희생된 사람들 모두의 넋을 어루만지고 상처를 보듬어 안아줄 보자기 같은 넉넉함을 지니고 있다. 따라서 그의 작업은 서사적이기 보다는 차라리 서정적이다. 그의 이런 인본주의적인 태도는 상처를 어루만지고 영적인 치료가 필요한 사람들에게 치유의 의미를 갖는다.
  1995년 광주비엔날레에 출품된 중외공원 소나무 숲에 쏟아 놓은 2.5톤의 헌 옷과 보따리들은 한국의 민주화의 전기를 마련한 광주민주항쟁의 희생자들에게 헌정했던 작품이다. 또 1996년 나고야 시립미술관에서 선보인 <Deductive Object - Dedicated to my Neighbors> (1996)은 한국을 식민지로 지배했던 일본과 한국민들의 고통을 나누고 서로의 지배자와 피지배가가 아닌 가해자인 동시에 피해자인 한국민과 일본인에 대한 화해와 상생을 위한 작품이었다. 또 1999년 48회 베니스비엔날레에 출품한 <d'APERTutto or Bottari Truck in Exile>(1999)는 코소보 내전으로 인한 인종청소로 희생된 사람들에게 헌정했다. 때로는 정치적인 발언으로 비추어지는 이런 작업도 사실은 그간의 김수자의 작업에 비추어 본다면 겉과 안이 서로 통하는 즉 호흡해서 그 겉과 안을 구분할 수 없는 보자기처럼 모든 것을 감싸 안으려는 마음에 다름 아니다.
  이러한 의도의 작품은 2000년과 2001에도 이어지는데 아즈텍 문명의 피라미드를 파괴하고 그 위에 건설된 멕시코의 조칼로 광장에서의 비디오 작업과 노예무역이라는 인류의 야만적 치부의 상흔이 곳곳에 남아있는 나이지리아의 알파비치에서의 작업들이 그것이다.
  그의 치유와 화해 그리고 관용을 위한 작품은 경우에 따라서는 예술과 일상의 간극을 해체하는 방식을 취하기도 한다. 에든버러의 푸르트마켓 갤러리, 로테르담의 보이닝겐 미술관, 일본의 세타가야 미술관, 2002년 휘트니 비엔날레 출품작인 센트럴 파크의 카페테리아에서 보여준 작품이 그러한 예이다.
  김수자는 미술관의 카페테리아나 식당의 테이블에 예의 현란하고 화려한 이불보를 테이블보로 사용했다. 사람들은 그 위에서 먹고, 마시고, 떠들면서 즐기면서 작품과 일체가 되었다. 아니 작품의 일주가 되었다. 이렇게 잠자리의 침대 커버로 쓰이는 이불보가 일상이 되어 또 다른 의미소로 전환된 사례이다. 이렇게 그는 일상과 예술의 간극을 넘나들면서 보자기가 보따리가 되는 과정을 통해 사람들의 고정된 관념으로부터 해방시킨다. 관념과 관습으로부터의 일탈은 자유로운 영혼을 의미한다. 불안정한 오브제로서의 예술작품은 사람들을 곤혹스럽게 하지만 이불보를 일상속의 예술로 재구성함으로서 일상의 예술화를 시도한다. 규정된 의미보다는 일상의 자유로움을 통해 예술이라는 ‘불안한 오브제'(Anxious Objects)로부터 해방시킴으로서 주체와 타자의 경계를 해체하는 동시에 일상사의 표면을 헤쳐 나오도록 배려함으로서 현대미술의 난해함을 잊고 즐길 수 있도록 예술을 일상으로 되 돌려놓는다.
  그의 모든 것을 포용하고 감싸 안음으로서 모든 역사와 가치의 충돌로부터 화해시키는 도구인 보따리는 빛이라는 광대한 보따리로 전이된다. 그는 4백 년전 지구상에 존재하지 않았던 미국의 치부인 남북전쟁의 발발지인 사우스 캐롤라이나의 주도 찰스턴의 모리스 섬 등대를 빛으로 감싸 안는 (2002) 으로 노예제도로 희생된 흑인들의 영혼과 이 땅의 원 주인인 이었던 인디언들의 원혼은 물론 남북전쟁으로 희생된 사람들의 혼백을 달래주었다. 빛을 발함으로서 오가는 배들의 충실한 안내자가 되어 주었던 등대는 거꾸로 빛의 보따리에 안김으로서 스스로가 빛을 발하는 것이 아니라 처음으로 빛을 받아 새롭고 찬연한 모습으로 거듭나게 된 것이다. 이런 아름다운 야경에서 역사의 상흔은 사라지고 치유되면서 새롭게 재생된다. 발레시아 비엔날레에서의 (2002)를 통해 거울처럼 맑은 물로 목욕을 시키듯 오래된 건축물의 때를 벗기는 의식을 거행하기도 한다.
  이런 빛의 보자기는 프랑스 릴의 라모(Rameau)성에 설치한 (2003)로 이어진다. 3백 여 개의 붉은 연등이 둥근 천정에 매달리고 7개의 조명 그리고 티벳과 이슬람 그리고 그레고리안 성가가 어우러지는 홀은 인간의 영혼을 치유하고 인간의 영적 위안을 준다는 종교의 역설적 현실을 되돌려놓는다. 화해와 상생이라는 본래의 종교적 의미는 종교 간의 갈등과 분열을 넘어 다시 일체를 이루면서 존재할 뿐이다. 또 2003년 하와이에서 열린 한국이민 100주년 기념전에서 그는 를 통해 하늘과 땅을 하나로 연결시키는 동시에 100년 전의 역사와 오늘을 관통하는 통로를 거울을 통해 이어줌으로서 천상과 천하는 하나로 이어진다. 그리고 이렇게 거울과 빛의 모습으로 전치된 보자기의 절정은 2003년 스페인 마드리드에서 열린 <To Breathe – A Mirror Woman>(2006), the Crystal Palace, Madrid 에서 절정이 이른다. 그는 거울을 바닥에 깔아 둥근 돔형의 천정을 바닥에 투사시킴으로서 하나의 반원의 건축물을 구(球)로 만들고 특수 필름으로 유리궁전을 벽들을 차단시킴으로서 스스로 발광하는 주체로 자리매김한다. 무지개 빛으로 빛나는 유리궁전의 안과 밖은 더 이상 내부와 외부 또는 바닥과 천정이라는 경계를 넘어 하나의 공간으로 일체를 이룬다. 서로가 서로를 반사하면서 이루어내는 빛의 향연은 황홀할 정도로 유리궁전의 안팎을 수놓고 신발을 벗고 바닥을 거닐면 작가의 숨소리와 명상적인 음향까지 더해지면서 거울의 연못에 비춘 천정의 환상적인 실루엣으로 인해 관객은 자신의 내면으로 여행을 떠난다. 그리고 이런 빛의 보자기는 비디오와 결합해서 아름다운 오페라 극장의 무대를 비춤으로서 빛의 파동을 극복하며 오페라의 선율보다 더 아름다운 명상적 체험을 제공하는 공연 없는 감동의 극장으로 화한다.