Kimsooja

Kimsooja (b.1957), based in Seoul and Paris, is an international conceptual artist whose practice converges on the totality of life and art, transcending distinctions of medium and form through works of painting, sewing, installation, performance, video, light, sound, and architecture. In the early 1980s, while probing the connection between the two-dimensional surface of the canvas and the structure of the world, Kimsooja adopted sewing and wrapping as modes of painting. This recontextualized women’s domestic labor within contemporary art and placed her work at the intersection of everyday life and art. Formally, Kimsooja’s work reveals the vertical and horizontal structure woven into the fabric of the canvas, or the surface of painting, as a dualistic and cyclical order of the world. Kimsooja began sewing used bed covers and clothings based on this principle. She wrapped found objects in used cloth and subsequently presented bottari, which transformed a cultural product into a critical multi-dimensional object that is at once a painting, a sculpture, and a performance. The evolution of her artistic inquiry from the material to the immaterial parallels Kimsooja’s principle of “non-doing” and “non-making” that makes aware what already exists without the intent of making it. Her reflection on the myriad issues pertaining to formal, sociopolitical, and existential borders, from migration and displacement to identity, poverty, religious clashes, and life and death finds its origin in the question of the surface in painting. Kimsooja’s work continues to transcend boundaries of artistic forms as it confronts challenges critical to humanity today.

Kimsooja’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in major international museums, as well as in more than 40 biennials, triennials, and large-scale site-specific projects. Kimsooja has represented Korea at the 24th Bienal de São Paulo in 1998 and at the Korean Pavilion in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. She has received the Whitney Museum of American Art's American Art Award in 2002, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award in 2002, the New York Foundation for Contemporary Art's Visual Arts Award in 2007, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award in 2014, the French Legion of Arts and Letters (Chevalier) in 2015, the Samsung Foundation's Hoam Award for the Arts in 2015, the Asia Society Art Award in 2017, the French Legion of Arts and Letters (Officier) in 2017, the Jade Crown of Korea's Cultural Medal in 2021, and the Fukuoka Prize in 2024.

Most recent selective exhibitions include Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection (2024), Ethnologisches Museum and Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Humboldt Forum (2023), Cisternerne, Frederiksberg Museums (2023), Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Metz (2022), Wanås Konst (2020), Traversées \ Kimsooja in Poitiers (2019), Peabody Essex Museum (2019), Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Chapel (2019), Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2017), MMCA Hyundai Motor Series (2016), Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2015), Centre Pompidou Metz (2015), Crystal Palace of Reina Sofía Museum (2006), National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMST) (2005), Kunstpalast Düsseldorf (2004), Museum of Contemporary Art(MAC) Lyon (2003), PAC Milan (2003), Kunsthalle Wien (2002), Kunsthalle Bern (2001) and MoMA PS1 (2001). She has participated in biennials and triennials such as BIENALSUR (2021, 2023), Documenta14 (2017), Venice Biennale (2013, 2007, 2005, 2001, 1999), Gwangju Biennale (2012, 2000, 1995), Lyon Biennale (2000), São Paulo Biennale (1998), Istanbul Biennale (1997), and Manifesta 1 (1996).

Credit: STUDIO KIMSOOJA



Kimsooja, Cities on the Move – 2727km Bottari Truck, 1997, Single Channel Video, 7:33 loop, SilentCourtesy of Kimsooja Studio
Cities on the Move – 2727km Bottari Truck (1997) is a landmark video performance by Kimsooja, commissioned by the Korean Arts & Culture Foundation in 1997. In this work, the artist travelled 2,727 kilometers across South Korea for eleven days, atop a mound of bottari—bundles made of traditional Korean bedcovers for wrapping one’s belongings. Kimsooja sits motionless on the back of the truck, her ...
Presented as a single-channel video, the slow unfolding of landscape in a static shot emphasizes duration, repetition, and endurance. In this way, Kimsooja reconfigures the notion of the body in transit: not as an agent of action, but as a witness to time, space, and memory. Through the seemingly simple gesture of riding through a country on the back of a truck, the artist maps the emotional and psychological terrain of contemporary existence, raising subtle yet powerful questions about individual cultural identity, home and relocation.
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