'The space is nowhere. The space is within itself like honey in a comb.' [1]  The enigmatic quality of this image lies in the special powers of honey — first to accrue and then to spread out, and, resistant to being sealed off, to transform and expand space with its light and scent. This observation can assume broader implications as an analogy for a universal outlook that from the Renaissance through to the present has been formulated by philosophers and poets alike. Namely, that the way we experience exterior space, its boundlessness and its limits depends on the inner space of the subject experiencing it. It is this inner space alone that determines the extent and expansion of space and things, an insight Rilke couched in the words 'the one space stretches through all beings, an inner cosmos', and, elsewhere, 'Space spreads transposingly from us to things: / to properly feel how a tree upsprings, cast around it space from that which inwardly / abides within in you. Surround it with retention. / It has no bounds. Not until its reascension / in your renouncing is it truly tree.' [2] 

To examine experience and objects in terms of their dynamic power to seize and occupy space, to think through time and space in terms of their capacity to expand, in other words to give visual form to the potent equivalence between substance and 'extance' [3]  is probably the most important creative principle propelling Kimsooja's work.

Born in Taegu in 1957 and a resident of New York since 1999, the Korean artist has no need to impress through heroic gestures. The barest means — needle and thread, and a few pieces of used cloth — are quite enough for her. These can, for example, end up as The Heaven and the Earth, one of her first works from 1984. Kimsooja was 27 years old when she stitched together the scraps of material left over from those of her deceased grandmother's old silk dresses that were not fully worn-out and faded. Here, echoing the title, the entire universe is laid out before us — the earth's four quadrants designated by the four points of the compass and at their centre, as described in many ancient cultures, the fifth realm where the 'world mountain' or the site of the 'column of heaven' [4]  is located. That this can indeed be understood to represent a universe is confirmed if one closely examines and elucidates the full body of Kimsooja's art and its underlying coherence.

Having studied painting in Seoul and lithography in Paris, the artist was concerned from the outset with finding means of abandoning the frame encompassing the canvas and the image. In the early nineties she stitched together patches of coloured fabric into relief-like, freely proliferating forms, mounting onto walls a rich spectrum of semi-circular shapes or tondi. Cloth, needle and thread in lieu of canvas, paints and brushes. But these are fabrics that once 'had a life': worn garments or traditional Korean bedspreads. Kimsooja seeks out these pieces of cloth because they 'retain the smells of others' lives, memories and histories, though their bodies are no longer there — embracing and protecting people, celebrating their lives and creating a network of existences.' [5]  These works also have titles that allude to something far beyond the borders of the object and fill it with interior space, such as Toward the Mother Earth.

Stepping beyond

For Kimsooja the act of sewing quickly became far more than a mere departure from painting, as this shift gave her the means to evolve a cognitive approach and a world view, spawning a central idea that was soon to animate her entire work. All the works she has produced since then can be considered part of an exploratory quest to fathom this mythical universe spun around needle and thread. Indeed, unlike any other instrument the needle is able to hold 'the thread, drawing it through the surface into the lower layers, into an underworld of downward motion. There is the needle that moves along the boundary, between the panels it is about to join together. It overcomes intermediary space. But the needle has no existence of its own. It is an instrument, a means; once the work is done, the needle disappears.' [6]  When Kimsooja — who even sewed her own name together from her forename Sooja and her family name Kim — describes the needle's attributes one clearly sees how closely she identifies with this instrument of artistic labour. At the time she was making her large and increasingly expansive relief-like textile collages, she also began working on objects which she modified by covering their surfaces with fabrics. There are, for instance, the large runged wheels some 185 cm high, steel structures made by the artist and assembled together with discarded farming tools; these interest her less as ready-mades than as objects which once had a purpose and are thus imbued with their own time and history. The fabric cover softens the sharp edges and points, transforming the work tool into a feminine and visual object. [7]  While these experimental pieces are perhaps less striking than Kimsooja's other work they nonetheless assume a pivotal function within her artistic development in the sense that they mark the point of transfer of her textile surfaces into the third dimension.

This is the basis on which Kimsooja then founded a wholly new understanding of her role as an artist. In her subsequent works she no longer treated the needle as an extension of her hand but increasingly regarded herself and her own body as the needle, using it as a sewing tool to move between layers of textile. It was this new awareness that led her to make her first bottari, the Korean word for the cloth bundles that are so deeply part of Korean tradition. Even today the large, richly coloured and decorative bedcovers woven in silk or cotton are still used in Korea to transport clothes, books and household articles on journeys or as storage around the home. But these bundles are also the expression of a culture exposed to colonialist threat and repression, one whose constant preparedness for departure and escape has become fully ingrained in the habits of everyday life. A large cover of this kind still represents a typical wedding gift for young couples. Its functions mark the poles of human existence: as a bedspread it is equated with tranquillity, tenderness and birth; as a suspended stretcher it is used as a cradle for carrying the sick and the dead. But besides its place in Korean tradition a further significant aspect becomes evident if one considers the position textiles have held in age-old African-Arab culture. When a woven fabric is removed from the loom and the threads are cut the women pronounce the same ritual blessing as they would at the severance of a baby's umbilical cord. Thus in terms not only of its function but also of its manufacture a cloth could be likened to a bridge spanning the entire breadth of human existence, with the four sides of the loom signifying the four ends of the world.

Being alien

The idea of or awareness for the bottari arose during the period of Kimsooja's artistic residency at P.S. 1 in New York in 1992—93. In her studio she caught sight of the bundle in which she kept her clothes, as she had commonly done in Korea. Living in alien surroundings had changed her perception: 'Suddenly the bundle meant something entirely new to me. It was a sculpture and a painting in one and I realized that by the simple act of tying it together I could shift from two to three dimensions', she noted. [8]  At the P.S. 1 open studio in 1992 and the New Museum in New York a year later Kimsooja created her first installation made of bottari. On her return to Korea she exhibited them for the first time in her home country. In the village Yangdong in the Kyungju region she came across a deserted house which she chose as the site to install this work — brilliantly coloured cloth bundles spread out over the floor. Not only did this manifest an alien view of her own culture but it also instantly set the course for her adoption of alienness as a way of life. Within Kimsooja's oeuvre the bottari evolved into a kind of module that would recur in ever-changing variations in altogether different contexts during her travels over the following years.

At the same time, however, in 1995, she used fabrics to construct an ephemeral monument commemorating the two thousand Koreans who were shot dead in Kwangju. In May 1988 students and others who demonstrated against the imposition of martial law were brutally murdered by the government. For this work Kimsooja covered the ground of a wooded terrain with two and a half tons of cotton clothes, some bundled up into bottari, others piled in loose heaps. Visitors were able to walk over the laid-out clothing. As the installation ran its two-month course and the seasons progressed the items of clothing became increasingly intermingled with the earth of the forest floor. Called Sewing into Walking, a piece in which first she and then each of the visitors acted as needles gradually stitching together not only the past and the present but also the man-made and the naturally grown, the dead and the living.

This new dimension, whereby 'sewing' is extended to the outside world, gave rise to a spectacular image in her 1997 performance titled Cities on the Move — 2727 Kilometer Bottari Truck. For this work Kimsooja heaped piles of bottari onto the uncovered loading area of a lorry, fastening them with a crisscrossed web of strong elastic rope and then, seated on top of this bundle of bundles, travelled for eleven days though Korea visiting all the places she had ever lived in and which for her were thus loaded with memory. To reach these towns and villages the truck climbed sinuous roads over mountains and through valleys, boarded ferries to cross from seashore to seashore. Kimsooja explains why it was so important for her to sit on top of these itinerant bundles of belongings: 'my body — which is just another bottari on the move — is in the present, is tracing the past and, at the same time, is heading for the future, non-stop movement by sitting still on the truck. And though I used myself in this work, I tried to locate a more universal point where time and space coincide.' [9] 

Universe

This journey encompassed two extremes at once: the more or less conscious act of bidding farewell to her home country before moving completely to the US and the starting-point of a life that was to be increasingly shaped by the rhythm and her personal awareness of being on the move. But the 'universal point' Kimsooja was seeking might, arguably, reside in the perception of these folded clothes and tightly tied bundles as metaphors for the universe. The bundles could be seen as an altogether concrete expression of Leibniz's notion of the universe as a vast cloth that, however many new folds it acquires, always remains one and the same piece of cloth. 'The entire universe is a continuous body that is not divided but like wax can assume various forms and like a tunic can be folded in a variety of ways.' [10]  Even if Kimsooja herself, who is familiar in like degrees with eastern and western culture, would not draw such a reference to Leibniz, her work nonetheless offers evidence of a sensibility which grasps cloth as a phenomenon and takes account of its pronounced cultural-historical and philosophical connotations. Indeed, her work seems almost to have been woven from all the different contrasting manifestations of this same phenomenon, whether packed together in round, thick, heavy bundles placed on the ground or as pictorial surfaces fluttering gently and delicately against the wall — in the manner of how she went on to work with cloth. Besides fabric, there is hardly another material so rich in associative potential: it is capable of being one and many at the same time, yet can be returned to being one. But the particular quality of Kimsooja's work lies in how she takes the spiritual-corporeal dual nature of cloth, which for so long has fascinated philosophers and poets alike, and transposes it into a constantly revitalized and ever-evolving exploration of time and space.

The broad scope of her travel performance Cities on the Move — 2727 Kilometer Bottari Truck came full circle when she parked her lorryload of bottari in the 'd'Apertutto' [11]  hall during the Venice Biennale in 1999. The truck was installed in front of a large mirrored wall — as though her notion of living in exile were characterized by this dual vision of things. In this particular setting the installation was indeed titled Exile. The fact of departure is irrevocably sealed by the fact of arrival. In another performance, which felt almost like an inverted echo of her Venice installation, Kimsoojaspread one of these magnificently coloured fabrics over the grass between the gravestones of a cemetery in Brooklyn, where the cloth was billowed out by the wind like a sail. Looming behind her was the silhouette of New York with its towers looking as stone-carved as the tombstones. Performed in 2002, just a year after the terror attack on September 11, the piece she titled Epitaph was nothing further than a fluttering gravestone inscription. The Greek word epitaphion means 'at the grave', and it is precisely this embodiment of nothing more than the prepositional gesture of 'at', of hovering in the intermediate realm, of being suspended on the edge that constitutes the poetry of her work. This single gesture might also evoke Rilke's call to cast one's own immeasurable inward space around things so as to free them from their limits, to grasp them concretely in one's vision. But in this instance it was not just any object that she had taken to expand the space of experience. This too is why the 'ybulbo' — the name for large Korean bedcovers steeped in history and tradition — were able to 'spread open' their own space when long rows of them were suspended on washing lines traversing the room in the work A Mirror Woman (2002). Here, not only was the viewer's gaze immersed in a swirl of colour but his ears were also awash with sound, with the chants of Tibetan monks. But the covers were also hung between two walls of mirrors, incorporating the viewer into a never-ending reflection as he wandered through the floating, wafting walls of fabric, these swaying pictorial panels that in endless repetition constantly unfurled new fata morganas and chimerical spatial realms.