-From October 25th 2023 to February 19th 2024, Kimsooja’s works were also presented at another European museum: Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Ethnologisches Museum at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. Among other works, her Bottari played a central role in the exhibition: Kimsooja –(Un)Folding Bottari. Guest curator Keumhwa Kim was responsible for the exhibition, which, like Thread Roots at Museum De Lakenhal, also consisted of contemporary interventions within the museum collections, but here in the context of collections of Asian Art.

• The exhibition Kimsooja – (Un)folding Bottari marked the first exhibition at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin in which an internationally renowned artist was invited together with a curator from the source community to collaboratively develop contemporary interventions for the historical collection presentation of the Asian Art Museum and the Ethnological Museum at the Humboldt Forum. On display were fourteen stand-alone or groups of works by the artist Kimsooja in various media and techniques, unfolding new meanings and contexts in the exhibition spaces. Both older and new works, created especially for the exhibition, connected associatively with the historical objects in the museums’ galleries, inspiring dialogue and placing the collections and their themes in relation to the present.

• Particularly in the collections at the Humboldt Forum, where art objects and ethnographies are arranged in a strict chronology, regions and continents, Kimsooja’s contemporary intervention created a resonant space where different temporalities and spaces met. Central to the exhibition were the bottari. The Korean word bottari refers to a bundle of belongings wrapped in a traditional cloth with its four corners knotted together. For her bottari, the artist employs a Korean bed sheet (ybulbo) as the wrapping cloth, a material which accompanies Koreans from birth to death.

• In juxtaposition with the ceramics of Korean origin lined up in expansive display cases, which found their way into the royal Prussian collections in the early 20th century via a Japanese art dealer,[1] her bottari (2017), filled with used everyday clothes, narrate the intricate tales of migrating individuals, commodities and cultures. Positioned within the trans-regionally themed exhibition space, her knotted bundles mirror the transient condition as both an intentional and forced mode of existence. Derived from the bottari, Kimsooja presented a new group of works for the first time, Deductive Object – Bottari (2023). Drawing inspiration from the moon jar, an icon of Korean art in the 18th century, she engaged designers from the Staatliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Meissen to craft a series of oval spheres using traditional Korean manufacturing methods. Instead of the flexible woven texture of bed sheets, her porcelain bottari, with their firm white skin, gently enfolds the abyss of blackness, the mysterious existence of nothingness. The contours of the horizontal and vertical orbits metaphorize the container as a contemplative process of life and time, making the immaterial and ephemeral tangible and perceptible.

• The wall reliefs, Sewing into Soil: Invisible Needle, Invisible Thread (2023) are made out of the same porcelain mass – an unfolded form of Deductive Object – Bottari(2023). Using a needle, the artist perforated the wet porcelain mass in varying rhythms and directions of movement. The needle, sometimes moved slowly, sometimes in a single breath, leaves a series of inhomogeneous surfaces that capture the artist’s physical presence. In this new body of works, the needle once again plays an important role as a mediator connecting the self and the other, the self and the world, but also
  increasingly as a physical means of breaking through the two-dimensionality of the surface to explore the void and immateriality.

• The exhibition showed how Kimsooja’s artistic concept of bottari, ‘Folding and Unfolding’ and ‘Wrapping and Unwrapping’, as a transformable canvas and sculpture, unfolded new aspects. Her exploration of the duality between materiality and immateriality manifested like a common thread throughout the exhibition. Through intimate, healing, and meditative gestures, she brought together things, places and memories, guiding us towards recognizing our interconnectedness. Her interventions enlivened a place typically bound by the strict confines of the collection, exposing the museum’s static view of the ‘other’. This is the power of Kimsooja’s art: amidst a rigid world, she sets both people and places in motion.