South Korea

Kimsooja was born in Daegu, South Korea, in 1957. She studied Western painting at the Hongik University in Seoul, and her origin as a painter was a crucial starting point for the development of her art. Kimsooja’s "Sewing" series (1983–1992), her first work with fabric, brought forth an assemblage of fabric forming cruciform structures that synthesized an entangled and knotted vision of the world into a system of horizontals and verticals. Like the Spatialist painter Lucio Fontana who pierced the uni-colored canvas with a sharped-edged dagger, Kimsooja also made art that was no longer a screen of illusion but a three-dimensional structure as she weaved through the surface of the work, piercing holes into it.

She represented Korea for the 24th São Paulo Biennale in 1998 and the 55th Venice Biennale Korean Pavilion in 2013, and participated in more than 30 international biennials and triennials. She has had solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1; Cristal Palace, Reina Sofia; the Vancouver Art Gallery; Kunsthalle Wien; Kunsthalle Bern; Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein; Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, UK; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Padliglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan; Museum of Contemporary Art Lyon; Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf; Musée d’Art Moderne Saint-Étienne; The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; PAC Milan; Daegu Art Museum; ICC Tokyo; CCA Kitakyushu; the Plateau Samsung Museum, Seoul.

Instead of referring to her works as merely what “fiber art” is, she defines her own methodology as an application of the concepts of needle and thread to modern painting, sculpture, performance and video, even to sound and lighting works. This is what belies her career of some four decades.

In 1999, Kimsooja presented her most iconic work: A Needle Woman, a performance video piece that premiered at CCA Kitakyushu, and further evolved in subsequent showings as a multi-channel video projection.[1]InA Needle Woman the artist is seen her back facing the camera, wearing precisely the same clothes, standing precisely the same way in various metropolises: Tokyo, Shanghai, Delhi, New York, Mexico City, Cairo, Lagos, London, Patan, Nepal (1999–2001); and in a second series of performances: Havana, Cuba; N’Djamena, Chad; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Sana’a, Yemen; and Jerusalem (2005).Some locations visited in the work are places of violence, disrepair or unresolved conflict, lending to the needle a metaphoric function as an instrument of healing. Also in Laundry Woman (2000), a performance video piece shot in India, Kimsooja is seen immobile and standing in front of a river where debris seemingly drifts. A Needle Woman and A Laundry Woman exposed the artist’s stances on non-doing and immobility as a form of art practice; lending to the action of immobility the virtue of inverting an audience’s linear perception of space and time.