Kim Soo-ja has been on the road most of the time for the past 25 years or so, expressing life through her fabric works. The current exhibition, which comes four years after the New York-based artist’s previous show in Korea is titled Kim Soo-ja — Archive of the Mind. The nine works presented at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, show how her needle work is approaching ever closer to the origin of humankind.

Wherever she appears, her silhouette will catch your eye. Wearing long, black clothes with her longhair simply tied, Kim Soo-ja has the image of an ascetic seeking truth. The simple style of the artist, almost nearing her sixties,r eveals the consistency of her art world.Sitting on a heap of wrapped bundles, her trademark bottari, she has wandered in that style like a Zen master around major cities of the world, circling the globe several times.

In her first solo exhibition in Korea after a long break, Kim reviews the traces of her 30-year career, apparently putting it into order. In particular, she seems to have wrestled with the question of how to induce viewers' participation and communicate with them naturally. Stepping down from her position as an internationally renownedartist, and taking a break from her murderous travel schedule, she holds out a hand to visitors, suggesting they take a moment to join her in pondering the question: "What has made me so immersed in my work?”

Sitting on a Heap of Bottari

The first work that vaulted Kim Soo-ja onto the international art scene was the Bottari Truck. It was photographer Joo Myung-duk who made her known to the world with his landmark photo of her sitting on a heap of colorful bottari, with her back to the camera. This photo elevates one woman artist’s creative experiments from the common place wrapping of things to a truly unique concept of connecting people. For Kim, who depicts people through fabric, the needle is a tool in her hand extension of her body — an extension of her heart, in fact. Kim recalls the moment when she “encountered” the needle: “As I was stitching a quilt with my mother, I realized, through the movement of the needle, the natural course of life and death, inhalation and exhalation, and yin and yang.”
She had already begun to search for the deeper meaning of life while she was an art student at Hongik University: “I decided to become an artist because it was the way I could live my life contemplating its deeper meaning.” Pondering how to reveal the structure of the world, in a way that can express the vertical and horizontal on a two-dimensional surface,she felt her encounter with sewing was opening the door to her artistic journey. The characteristics of bottari — two dimensional when unfolded but three dimensional when wrapped — made it the ideal tool and concept for Kim, who sought to embrace every realm of humanity’s magnanimity, flexibility, and variability.
“My name, Soo-ja, sounds like the Hindi word for needle,” Kim says. Then, had her fate been predetermined? Kim saw herself as a needle when moving through the middle of a city in conflict and discord. Following the Bottari series, her subsequent work on A NeedleWoman and A Mirror Woman series made her one of the busiest artists in the world.

Destined to Wander

What would be the most objective standard for assessing an artist’s international fame? In the past, it was most often the prices that an artist’s works could fetch at an auction or global markets. Now there is another criterion: flight mileage.
Kim Soo-ja keeps a hectic schedule, spending five months of the year in New York, where she has lived since 1999, one month each in Seoul and Paris, and the remaining five months traveling from city to city for solo and invitational exhibitions. Art journalists receive emails from Kim Soo-ja’s studio on a nearly weekly basis, informing them of her latest and upcoming shows.
Kim’s works are inspired and based on the new ideas and tools of her global journeys;the essence of her work is the people she encounters on the road. Through the people who are her medium, the artist also has evolved. She says her work is characterized by “spatiality, spirituality, and identity,” but the overriding theme is people and the future they create. Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, an installation unveiled in September 2010 at the nuclear power plant in Yeonggwang,South Jeolla Province, is a video work that expresses the reality of the Korean Peninsula where nuclear threat looms. At the nuclear power plant, which contains the dual meaning of the destructive potential of nuclear power and its possible future to help address our energy needs, the artist exposes the perspective of a nomad with the message: “Rely on the natural circulation of earth, water, fire, and wind

Cutting Off the Edges of the Heart

Upon entering the exhibition Archive of the Mind(July 27, 2016–February 6, 2017),visitors are confronted with a gigantic oval table with a diameter reaching some 19meters. Far too large for an ordinary room,the table can be seen as an image of the mind or a galaxy, depending on one’s perspective.Visitors can take a seat at the table and knead a ball of clay, feeling the texture, something they seldom get to do.While rolling the clay around, they might think, “Why do I have to make only a ball?”But the artist’s intentions are expressed in this method of participation.
As she explained in a talk session about her exhibition, “It’s a place where you can empty your heart and cut off the edges.” There are so many edges in human affairs.The edges of conflict and division can lead to terrorism and war. The rotating action of touching and rolling the clay with the hands leads visitors to look into their inner state of mind. It enables them to feel something from the friction in their palms. The primitive tactile sensation and repeated hand movements enwrapping the void, suddenly evoke the circular illusion of nothingness.
The new sound performance work, “Unfolding Sphere,” exhibited along with the titlepiece of the exhibition, overwhelms the audience with a cosmic sense of space that corresponds to the image of the table’s surface scattered with clay spheres.

Traces of the Body

Geometry of the Body consists of a yoga mat hanging on the wall, the actual mat that the artist has used for the last 10 years, devoting herself to the exercise. It’s a kind of “bodypainting” with traces of the touch of hands and feet, the sweat and tears that have brought changes to the material. The mat here is not a ready-made object of the sort that has been used in art for a long time, but a “used object” that reflects the traces of the body. Such traces have created a new concept of painting.
Since deciding to become an artist, Kim Soo-ja has inquired into the question of the vertical and the horizontal. A Study on the Body, from 1981, is a visual of her attempts to answer this question during her early days. In this series of 45 silkscreen photos of her own performances, the body seems to be the base from which she perceives herself and the world as well as the root of her work.

One Breath is a digital embroidery piece that records the waves of inhalation and exhalation. The artist gave shape to the structure and form of breathing, as a prerequisite of survival, by pushing the needle through the fabric. While looking at the cycle of breathing embroidered on the satin fabric, one comes to wonder about the border between life and death. This work was based on the graphic depiction of sound waves in “The Weaving Factory,”a breathing sound performance presented in 2004.
Deductive Object, the casts of two arms alone on a wooden table, looks lonely. Is it because it represents the void? The thumb and index finger on each hand of the artist’s own casts are touching each other.

A few women are weaving and unweaving something, employing themselves as human needles.Perhaps that’s all there is to the path walked by humankind — being sewn into nature, breathing in and out, and permeating the void.

From Bottari to Anthropology

The finale of the exhibition is the new chapter (Chapter V) of the serial work Thread Routes, which is being shown for the first time. While traveling around the world, since 2010 Kim Soo-ja has been making a 16mm ary film series titled Thread Routes, of which the fifth of six installments is now complete. Exploration of the world’s weaving culture, a theme the artist has pursued throughout her entire career, is contained in a video of 21 minutes 48 seconds. It was filmed on reservation for Indians in the New Mexico area, which is home to Navajo and Hopi people, the original natives of the American continent. Critics have called this work a “visual poem without narrative” and "visual anthropology."
On a remote plain that gives rise to imaginings about the origin of mankind, the desolate ruins reminiscent of the Stone Age,lofty stone peaks, and the distant horizon reveal themselves as the base of the screen.
A few women are weaving and unweaving something, employing themselves as human needles.Perhaps that’s all there is to the path walked by humankind — being sewn into nature,breathing in and out, and permeating the void.
The little needle woman who used to sew small bundles, has now become a great needlewoman sewing the earth, traveling the galaxy, as always.