Even just a quick skim through Kimsooja’s career makes us wonder how a person could have possibly worked so hard. She made her debut on the international stage rather early, which was not all that large for Korean artists of her generation, and she gained domestic recognition, thanks to her success overseas. Yet that is not to say that she dives in for anything and everything; she refuses to show her work in exhibitions that do not align well with her philosophical and aesthetic beliefs or her sense of ethics, no matter how large and reputable they are. The long list of exhibitions and projects she participated in at home and abroad is the result of her enthusiasm about looking for opportunities to truly demonstrate her work and challenging herself through them. She took the decisive action to relocate not to settle somewhere, but solely for the sake of her work. Born in 1957, Kimsooja falls right in the middle of Korea’s baby boomer generation, which refers to those born between 1945 and 1965. Since this generation saw a surge in population, she had to live in an extremely competitive Korean society while compressed modernization was underway in the ashes of war. Opening a short critique of an artist’s work tritely with the generation theory is relevant to the questions about Kimsooja’s journey that seems close to impossible

In evolutionary terms, leaving the place one was born in and is familiar with is often due to the pressure for survival. This has been the case since ages ago when beings from the origin of our times moved from the waters to land and climbed down from the trees to dwell on land. Kimsooja is most widely referred to as the artist who globalized the very Korean object and concept of “bottari,” but nationality, ethnicity, school of thought, and school of art are typical
categories she wishes to avoid. The artist made clear judgments and had opinions about situations, but by nature, she was not aggressively vocal, which caused her to go on “cultural exile” in New York in the early 1990s when globalization was slowly starting to bud in Korea. Bottari, which had special meaning to the artist, was not so much about aesthetics to her, but rather a condition of life. In regards to her personal history, Kimsooja had to pack her bottari
often because her father was a soldier. Even today, where bottari is rare and due to the severance of tradition that has made hanbok material close to obsolete, bottari continues to occupy a place in the subconscious of Koreans that when someone tells us, “pack your bottari!” it strikes us like a bolt from the blue. Bottari sits between memory and expectation as well as between regrets and excitement. As in Cities on the Move - 2727 Kilometers of Bottari Truck (1997), through which the artist delivered an impressive performance of sitting on a bed of bottaris on a truck with her back facing us, the process is what’s important, not the starting point nor destination. Kimsooja’s bottaris paved the way for concepts and phenomena such as globalization, nomadism, and feminism that followed; however, an era is coincidentally encountered, not followed.

Meanwhile, Kimsooja’s work is transcendental and contemplative, as I noticed in her 2016 exhibition at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul. Her work appears distant from metaphysical idealism because she connects an understanding from trivial, everyday activities of a woman, like sewing, with performance, which has become “grammar” of contemporary art. She gives considerate amount of thought to the empty space that will come to be filled abundantly. Archive of Mind, a participatory installation where visitors are invited to roll clay balls, involves a large 19-meter-long oval wooden table, but the method it employs is simple. It resembles the scene of people gathering in circles during Korean holidays to roll mochi balls, and Kimsooja’s table of participation creates a structure like the Möbius band that naturally joins the opposites into one. Archive and mind seem like things that would not meet, but the artist brings the two together like fabric and needle. The meeting of fabric and needle creates something—the harmony of the soft and hard, the harmony of the opposites. This is
the fundamental and ultimate message of Kimsooja’s work.

The newest version of Kimsooja’s bottari project, presented in 2021, is an on-site installation of a shipping container painted in five cardinal colors called obangsaek, which expands the meaning of bottari to an industrialized module. Another recent work from last year that was installed at Leeum Museum of Art and filled the space with rainbow auroras reveals the existence of light that is omnipresent like the air that channels sound and breath. This light seems to fall in the mystic tradition, rather than have a metaphysical aspect to it as “a metaphor for truth” as said by Hans Blumenberg. Women have placed more importance on love and spirit than on doctrines and scriptures.