“My concept art position started with the moment I conceptualize the body as a needle,” Kimsooja told Observer. The idea goes back to her walking performance video Sew walk (1994). At the time, she did not describe herself as a conceptual artist, and she did not expect how far this practice would lead. “I didn't make any unique descriptions, but when I installed bedspread fabrics in the valley every day, that happened, and then in the end, I collected them on my shoulders and arms. It was a traditional transformative form of fabric, three-dimensional and fluid, with different painted surface states. As I walked around the valley, I found my body as a symbolic needle for knitting natural fabrics.”
When Kimsooja reviewed the video document, she also realized that for her, the video screen itself (even the camera lens) could be used as a packaging method, not just to capture images. That was the first time she conceptualized video production as an irrelevant process in a video screen. At the same time, her concept of the body as a symbolic needle comes from an objective observation of herself moving through nature. That was the first conceptualization that happened in her practice. Due to the initial implementation, She continued to move through the frame of that needle, especially on her body Needle woman The Performance Video Series is in various formats between 1999 and 2009: one as an eight-channel live video document, and the other in slow motion of the 2005 Venice Biennale, where she focused on cities marked by conflict and instability after the Iran-Iraq War.
The first video focuses on metropolis and spaces. At that time, Kimsooja was more interested in interacting with humans around the world and exploring her body, as a spatial axis that distinguishes and displays the differences between regions. The subsequent 2005 work was very different: it explores the concept of time, using her body as the zero point in slow motion, making the audience's body, reaction and action background background.
The concept of Kimsooja is also evolving – from needles to mirrors and breathing. Today, she connects needles to space and eternity. “The needle tip has a position, but no physical profession; it’s very interesting to open up a new space when I think of the needle point of view,” she said. When she performs do the laundry (2001/2007) She suddenly felt confused in the Yamuna River in India. “I'm so focused, almost like a needle. I'm wondering if the river flows through my body, or if my body moves on the river.”
On the other hand, the mirror is a reflector that shows everything ahead of it, but not itself, which raises more questions, inspires Kimsooja to try different performances and film projects and adopts her gaze as another way to express the needles in the world. In this way, she explores the relationships and juxtapositions of the cultural community, as well as the expressive elements of textile manufacturing as well as local communities, clothing, decoration and architectural forms.
“My early practice as a painter has always been about the passion for the surface of the canvas,” Kim Soya said. “The canvas itself may not be the focus of conceptualization, but the source of conceptualization. My basic question as a painter involves interrogating the boundaries and obstacles between the self and other relationships. The painter always experiences confrontation in front of the canvas. I connect sewing with the painting to the painting, by stabbing the canvas barrier to see how the surface connects the self to the other.”
After all, the canvas is fabric, and Kimsooja has been trying and thinking about its vertical and horizontal structures since she became an artist. “I see all the inner structures of the world, our language, our lifestyle, our mental state, even architecture and furniture – all of which have the basic structure of this cross-shaped shape.”
Kimsooja's conceptualization practice also involves the progress of work on a particular site, which begins with her interest in relational responses to space. She was particularly attracted by the site specificity outside the White Cube Gallery, where artists were often restricted because she was interested in hearing the sounds, colors, shapes and functions of the space. Her goal is to provide each site with the most accurate and poignant response, considering the conditions that may bring the most appropriate answers from the practical clues she is working on. “The curator’s questions were very interesting to me and answered the biggest questions from my knowledge and sensitivity, so the installation of each particular location was very meaningful and meaningful to me as a means to create new paths in my career and new experiences and expressions.”
Recently, Kimsooja completed a site-specific stained glass installation at Cathédrale Saint-étienne de Metz in France, commissioned for the 800th anniversary of the Cathedral. For her, it was a learning process – working with historic monuments and French stained glass experts to realize her stainless steel and glass work breathe As a permanent installation. This is also her first attempt at nanopolymer dyed glass. Kimsooja works with French master glass maker Pierre-Alain Parot, Kimsooja is able to juxtapose traditional handmade glass with industrial dichroic glass on top, creating unexpected light effects that vary with light source, direction, time, time and light intensity. “This kind of project that is always there makes a lot of sense.”
Another location-specific Kimsooja created during the pandemic is Sow into painting (2020) In Wanås Konst, Sweden, where she planted almost an acre of flax seeds. One side of the flax plant can be used to make flax canvas, while the other side can be used to extract painted flax seed oil. For her, planting became an act of painting land. The harvest is to make flax fibers, weaving and installing linens with the local community, which marks the return to the canvas after questioning the material – and everything that the problem brings: experimenting and examining different ways of understanding. It was a particularly meaningful project just like in a personal hard time, but seeing her field bloom brought her fun and hope.
Her latest site-specific work was installed in Alula, Saudi Arabia, a spectacular desert site that once was rocky, mountain ranges and geological strata below sea level. “It was so special in silence and fullness of light,” Kingsorha recalled. She created a maze of round glass windows coated with a diffraction grating film that breaks the intense sunlight into the rainbow spectrum. It also became a kind of canvas for her, as diffraction (woven together from the vertical and horizontal structures of light at the near-nanoscale) forms an insignificant, invisible fabric.
Although Kimsooja's practice has shifted from material to immaterial and from making to not conducting, she finds herself thinking more about preservation than before. Early in her career, when she worked with bedspreads and other fabrics, she recycled the materials and rarely preserved her works because her works were not usually sold or collected by museums or private collectors. She now believes that she “save more so that they can be used in different situations, although textile installation is not easy.” In her large-scale, intangible location-specific installations, she uses light and sound, ineffective and reflection as core materials, balancing the ephemeral and tangible in an evolving exercise.
John Cage's famous quote has had a lasting impact on Kimsooja's artistic practice. It comes from Cage's undocumented device at the 1985 Paris Biennale. Although Kimsooja expects to see works related to music, there is no sound in the space, no sound. “I found a panel, a white panel written in black on the corner of the bottom side of the container with 'heard sound'. I was totally shocked by the words, and I immediately recognized him as a master, and since then, it has been in my mind whenever I questioned composition and non-manufacturers.”
Kimsooja's current project returns to her status as a painter and explores the full potential of Black. She has started a name called Yuan Paintingshe squirted
When she created a completely dark room for the Korean Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, she first began exploring the colors of black, a work that recalls the devastating impact of Hurricane Sandy on the community. It investigates the source of ignorance as the source of fear after the disaster. The black painting project she is working on is also a continuation of her Deduction object Series of sculptures and paintings and her Brahman (Indian Cosmic Egg) Inspired Work obangsaeka traditional Korean range of five colors. Even as her practice develops, her work continues to explore immaterial, light and site specificity through various media. For Kimsooja, website specificity is never restricted by the material or even the site itself.
