Kimsooja
- Born in Taegu, South Korea- 1957
- Earned her BFA and MA from Hong-IK University, Seoul
- She choose the name Kimsooja for herself because it eliminates the gender association- there is no separation of her given name and her family name.
- lives and works in New York
- She started off using the bottari as an alternative to painting on paper and then began to see the possibilities that can come from simply wrapping the bottari and began to work three-dimensionally
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| Mind and the World, 1991 |
Influence/Early Life Here
Kimsoojas contribution to the Art world
- she uses the "bottari"- a traditional bed cover used to wrap personal belongings in her work, which serves as a metaphor for structure and connection
- she relies on the presence of the viewer and emphasizes it in her work, allowing the viewer to take some of the bottaris in some of her exhibition installations
-uses the human body, fabric, air that she considers to be breathing fabric and sewing in her work- predominately.
- she uses her body as a method of describing human interaction, anonymity and the power of stillness
- her videos and installations blur boundaries between aesthetic and transcendent experience through repetitive actions: doing laundry and sewing, everyday actions.
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| A Sacred Soliloquy |
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| Deductive Object VI |
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| 'Bottari Truck', 2000- Rodin Gallery |
- " In her 1997 video work Cities on the Move - 2727 km bottari truck, she traveled throughout the countryside of Korea for 11 days in a small truck piled with bottaris
in the back. Kim moved often when she was a
child because her father, who was a serviceman, had frequent job
transfers. In that sense, Cities on the move
is a travel through the memories of her own childhood. At the same
time, it is a metaphor for her current state of being, an artist who
constantly travels for work to different places in the world, and the
work expresses the sensibilities of "on the move" and "itinerant"
inherent in the bottari. When the video portion of the work, accompanied by the bottari truck,
were shown at the 1998 Bienal do Sao Paolo and the 1999 La Biennale di
Venezia, Kimsooja became known in the art world as the so-called bottari artist who poses the questions of identity, mobility, borderlessness, and nomadism."
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| Needle Woman 1999-2001 |
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| "Encounter–Looking Into Sewing," 1998-2002 |
