One of the influencial topics in Western art since the late eighties is — in different facets — the issue of absence. Service art, art as curating, the nomadic existence, the anonymization of individual authorship due to collective creativity — this and more are indicators for the fact that artists have increasingly tried in the past few years to break out of the system of self-reference which has been a major influence on Western art since the Sixties. Absence is used here mainly as a strategy, in order to undermine the increasing personalization in the arts and to access fields once again, which open up a stronger connectivity between art and its social dimension. Nevertheless, these strategies always inhere the matrix of self-reflexiveness. The opening of Western art to cultural influences from other continents — due to globalization — is of special importance in this situation, because from here, beyond the discourse-safe products for the western art market, also originate important impulses for a renewed debate about how art can dedicate itself again to the general questions of the human life in a way that it fulfills contemporary aesthetic standards at the same time.

Kimsooja was born in 1957 in Korea, and now lives in New York. She is one of those artists who have, over the past fifteen years, contributed significantly to this re-orientation of contemporary art. She has grown up in a culture shaped by Confucianism, yet her immediate environment was dominated by Catholicism. The fact that the family had to move repeatedly, due to her fathers occupation in the military, led to the early experience of uprooting, a sentiment that has also influenced Western culture throughout the 20th century. In an interview with Gerald Matt, Kimsooja characterized herself in these words: "Travelling is not always voluntary for me. I was often forced to travel. Travelling belongs to my life, since I was a small girl (...) Settling down and being shuffled around, meeting and separation - these topics were always present for me. I have the mentality of a person living on a border line, and the materials, with which I work, correspond to that. Since my childhood I had a lot to do with 'longing' and ' homesickness' with 'memory gaps' and 'adjustment to the new environment'." [1]

This personal background influenced the development of Kimsooja's art and her body of consistent work has grown since the 80s. The materials refered to above were first those which belonged to the artist's grandmother. After her death, Kimsooja used the fabrics in order to create large sized murals, which are in the spirit of the painting she had initially studied in Korea. But already the use of these materials tainted with memories - with all colouredness of the individual materials, which were formed to abstract compositions � focuses on absence, i.e. the loss of her grandmother. At the same time, the use of these fabrics in itself breaks a taboo, as cloths are regarded to belong to the people who wore them during their lifetimes. This double "absence" (the mental-physical of the grandmother on the one hand, the disrespect of tradition on the other hand), this ambivalence is characteristic of Kimsooja's artistic procedure altogether.

It cannot be the place here, to discuss in detail the development of Kimsooja's œuvre, for this I would like to point briefly to the recently published overview of her work. [2]

Yet, it is crucial for me, that the motif of absence can be found in the entire body of work that Kimsooja has realized so far. It is to be observed that the artist understands absence not as a motif of deficiency, but as a constructive, dialectic strategy. After her scholarship at P.S.1 in New York, Kimsooja's first new work concentrated above all on the traces of usage on objects, Deductive Objects. With this group of works the artist succeeded in detaching herself from the painting as the focus of her visual production, and consequently extended her vocabulary in rapid steps by installation, video, photo and performance.

Fabrics play a particular role in the group of works, Sewing Into Walking, the Bottaris, and partly also in the series, A Laundry Woman. Finally, they also form the basis for the 2004 graphic edition, Seven Wishes, featuring different motifs of Korean cloths which were used also for the Bottaris and different installations in the series of A Laundry Woman. Furthermore, works like the photo/video/performance work Encounter and the photowork Epitaph, demonstrate Kimsooja's 'souverain' handling of this topic.

In another group of work, absence is connected with spatiotemporal questions. In these works, the allegorical function of the above mentioned works with a stronger pictorial character step back in favor of a dialectic relationship between work and viewer. I am refering specifically to the performance series A Needle Woman, developed for the video camera (a second set of performances in this series is pending) as well as the related series A Homeless Woman and A Beggar Woman and several works from the series A Laundry Woman. In these works, Kimsooja is always located in the center of the picture, her back towards the viewer, immobile, sitting or lying. All that happens takes place around her. Either she is surrounded by streams of people in metropolises of different continents, or the slow stream of a river flows, passing before her. The dialectic of immobility and mobility in these works, already discussed by different authors, rotates around the center of absence, as it is featured in Kimsooja's work. The artist herself has highlighted it in the following statement: "Everything moves, and movement is a fundamental condition of being. The oscillation of each moment has its own rhythm. Nevertheless the difference between mobility and immobility for me is comparatively small. I have aligned my body to a certain extent to the threshold of a sensitive barometer, which differentiates between the fine borders of mobility and immobility. It is somewhat logical therefore that the mobility of my body located in certain roads, in certain cities, in different continents represents an example of immobility, while my decision to move is on the contrary completely sudden and takes place unconsciously. The decision falls within an energetic conflict between two different elements, my body and the external world. I always wanted to show reality by presenting to people things the way they really are, without doing something, making or creating something further, while most artists and actors strive to create or show something new." [3]

Absence is thus for the artist an important means in her art to communicate to the public an experience corresponding to her own experience and her own reflections. Therefore Kimsooja's artistic approach has not unjustifiably been called "existential minimalism", a term, she emphatically embraces for her �uvre. Under this label a contemporary western current meets the timeless practices of Zen Buddhism. For Buddhists the void, i.e. absence, means abundance, inasmuch as the emptiness gives space for meditation on life. We can therefore define Kimsooja's work as a rare case of intercultural fertilization, which highlights the particular importance of her art.

The Exhibition

For the Kewenig Galerie in Cologne, Kimsooja conceived an exhibition which is to be understood as an installation. The center point is an old truck, loaded with Bottari bundles, further individual Bottaris, the graphic edition Seven Wishes, likewise related to the Bottari materials and 4 video projections. The exhibition title refers unmistakably to the transitory nature of the manifestation. Already three linguistic elements refer to it: The term of the Bottari itself, the date and finally the combination with the place. Bottaris are bundles, in which Korean people, in particular women, are traditionally tying together their belongings in cloths, to take with them when moving � out of necessity or voluntarily - to another place. The cloths are usually bed cloths or bedspreads, given as the traditional Korean wedding gift. Thus they are closely bound to their owners, often accompany them until the end of their life, also because the motifs, inserted into the cloths, represent the well wishes of the giver, which are hoped to be fulfilled during the course of life. In Seven Wishes, Kimsooja features five of these motifs, complemented by two large size abstract motifs, i.e. by wish-motifs, which are waiting to be filled with life.