Kimsooja
Born in 1957 in Daegu, Korea, lives and works between Paris and Seoul
Kimsooja is an internationally acclaimed, multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works in New York, Paris and Seoul. Her work spans various media, including painting, sculpture, installations, performances and videos.
A nomadic artist whose work revolves around the themes of exile and travel, Kimsooja explores the idea of movement – one’s own and other people’s – and the narratives it generates. For more than 40 years, the artist has focused on one of her culture’s timeless traditions: the bottari. This Korean word refers to a bundle wrapped in fabric, which Kimsooja sees “as a self-contained world – but one which can contain everything, like a vessel, materially and conceptually”. By reappropriating the bottari as both an object and a symbol, the artist contemplates and questions the experience of migration, from departure to arrival and in-between, while also addressing the issue of status – one’s own and that of others.
A proponent of a principle she calls “non-doing”, Kimsooja takes a contemplative aesthetic approach based on perception and observation. By focusing the viewer’s attention on a particular object or phenomenon, the artist makes way for apparitions that question the forces at work in art and in life, inviting everyone to feel and experience the world through all its surfaces. Kimsooja’s site-specific installations transform a particular space and make it possible to perceive intangible concepts like the passage of time. Her work has a strong meditative and introspective dimension. To fully experience and appreciate it, visitors need to be attentive and receptive to their environment.
Kimsooja represented Korea at the 24th São Paulo Biennial (1998) and the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and has been invited to take part in more than 40 contemporary art biennials and triennials. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at such prestigious venues as MoMA PS1, the Reina Sofía Museum’s Palacio de Cristal, Vancouver Art Gallery, Kunsthalle Wien, Kunsthalle Bern, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, Saint-Etienne Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Bilbao and Centre Pompidou-Metz. Kimsooja has taught at Beaux-Arts de Paris (2008-2009) and was appointed Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2017. In September 2022, Kimsooja inaugurated the stained-glass windows she designed for Metz’s gothic cathedral, which were commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture to mark the cathedral’s 800th anniversary.
Photo Giannis Vastardis. Courtesy Kimsooja Studio.