Keumhwa Kim
Dear Sooja, you have been described by many art critics as a global nomad time and again. The meaning of travelling has changed a lot in recent years, especially due to the Covid pandemic. How has this affected your artistic practice? And how important is the experience of being on the road to your work?

Kimsooja
The last four years have been an interesting shift in how to make art in times of a pandemic, both in terms of my own experience as a nomadic artist and with regard to my installation practice in situ. For my site-specific installations, I would normally travel there to get an idea of and to feel the physicality of the site. Instead of physical presence, however, I rather had to use my imagination and sense of space, judging from the photos or videos provided. Moreover, I would install pieces via video calls, communicating with the installers and curators, even for large-scale installations that need a great sense of precision and a long development process. This was sometimes possible thanks to my sense of space from memory, but often with great collaboration and support from the curators and community members. Still, I cannot deny the benefits of travelling, as it has frequently been my source of inspiration and experience in the world, often giving me new artistic insights. In the last few years, we had to spend a part of our lives in virtual reality, but today we may also have to travel less to save the planet and our limited energy. After the process of globalisation, which opened up the world and made it accessible from everywhere, we are finally appreciating locality.

Keumhwa Kim
Let’s talk about bottari, which gives the exhibition its title: (Un)Folding Bottari. What is your personal connection to bottari?

Kimsooja
I noticed that bottari have been used in Korea and other Asian countries as a typical carrying item, and even as a means of protecting important government and legal documents. I have also come to notice that bottari are universal objects, used for any means of migration as well as in war zones in Europe and around the world, as it is the easiest, lightest, and simplest way to pack things in urgency. It is interesting for me to see the coincidence of linguistic similarities of bottari (beginning with b or bo) for instance in Turkish (bohça), Mongolian (bagts), Hindi (bandal), Vietnamese (bó), Nepali (bandala), English (bundle) or German (Bündel). It was a ground-breaking moment when I discovered that this everyday making and methodology of bottari would become my core artistic inspiration and new vocabulary. A number of bottari have been in my studio ever since 1983, as I have been keeping them to store my sewing materials, such as used clothes and bedspreads. One day when I was at the PS1 residency in 1992, I was sitting in my studio. Suddenly I turned around and discovered a unique red bottari sitting on the floor that looked completely different from the everyday object I had been storing and using. It was a significant and unique object, consisting of different elements of visual languages and meanings; a wrapped two-dimensional painting, a three-dimensional sculpture held together by a knot. I started making Bottari as a three-dimensional sewing practice by wrapping, and I wrapped Bottari with fragments of used cut fabrics of colourful traditional clothes until 1993, then with used everyday clothes since I returned to Korea when I realised that bottari are not only aesthetic but also realistic objects.

Keumhwa Kim
The exhibition displays the multimedia trans- formation of your concept of bottari: starting from Bottari (2017), wrapped in ybulbo, Korean bed sheets, to Bottari 1999 – 2019 (2019), the transport container painted in obangsaek, and Deductive Object – Bottari (2023), new porcelain work, how would you define the concept of bottari in your artistic practices?

Kimsooja
For me, a bottari is an essential object that rep- resents our body, the condition of humanity, a fundamental aesthetic and formal aspect that retains spatial, social, political and temporal dimensions. I see our body as the most complicated bottari, and the place of ybulbo, a Korean bedspread I use as a wrapping cloth, as the frame of our life; the place where we are born, love, dream, suffer, and die. It contains so much, so many different issues that we deal with. I have wrapped and unwrapped bottari and I am still discovering new aspects of this fluid canvas and sculpture.

Keumhwa Kim
Based on the collection of the Korea Gallery, you developed a new work for the show: Deductive Object – Bottari, inspired by an icon of Korean art: a moon jar. Why did you decide to derive Bottari from moon jars?

Kimsooja
When I saw the Korean gallery for the first time, I was quite surprised to see the poor collection of ceramics and the small gallery space compared to other Asian countries such as China, Japan and India etc. I felt the urge to bring large Korean moon jars, representative of Korean traditional treasures with a humble presence of beauty and generosity, portraying the Korean spirit. While thinking about a possible loan of the moon jars from the National Museum of Korea, I decided to collaborate with the ceramic factory Staatliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Meissen to make them in my own bottari concept and form. Ever since my collaboration with the Sèvres Ceramic Manufacture in Paris (2019), I have been conceptualising the moon jar as a Bottari, but I have never installed a Bottari in a display case to physically juxtapose it with the moon jar. In fact, creating a direct visual relationship between a Bottari and a moon jar at the Humboldt Forum was a very effective and interesting way to present Bottari; one with fabric, the other with porcelain.

Keumhwa Kim
What aspect of the moon jar interests you personally?

Kimsooja
For me, it symbolises gentleness, abundance and an embracing generosity that is ready to hold everything in humble presence, like a moon. It also reminds me of a woman’s body, especially the belly of a pregnant woman wearing a traditional long white Korean skirt with a wide band around the chest. In the sense that a moon jar is a container, I immediately relate it to the functionality of my Bottari as a container that also has a width that can be embraced with both arms. I rather emphasised the inner emptiness by opening only a tiny hole, with- out leaving any functional space as with traditional moon jars, and without adding any other elements that the traditional Korean moon jar shape has, such as the opening band part and that of the base. My idea of conceptualising the Korean moon jar as a Bottari stands alone with its own basic formal elements; the surface as a wrapped fabric, the orbit of horizontal and vertical movement to form the shape as a contemplative process of life and time. The tactile physicality of the moon jar makes it the other, and the wrapped invisible dark void as the unknown black hole, revealing a larger question about the material and immaterial, existence and transience, even cosmic questions similar to Bottari.

Keumhwa Kim
To Breathe: Mandala (2010) is presented by means of two different sound channels: the artist’s voice on the one hand and a mix of Gregorian and Tibetan chants and the Islamic call to prayer on the other, forming an expansive and site-specific dia- logue with the Bodhisattva sculpture. What was your intention to bring both sound channels together?

Kimsooja
My initial concept was to use the typical American jukebox loudspeaker as a mandala. While the first edition only played Tibetan mandala chanting as a single channel sound in 2003, the Iraq war broke out in the same year. When I noticed how much destruction, hatred and violence was created all around the globe, I decided to comment on it in a spirit of criticism, also suggesting a harmonious and peaceful coexistence by overlapping the three representative religious chants. Installing it next to the Bodhisattva together with To Breathe: Mandala, which plays my own breathing and humming performance, gives an even stronger presence of existence and peace, although I did not intend to emphasise Buddhism as the main religious practice among others.