Loading
Confront and Deconstruct - Nomadism (Kimsooja, Kyungah Ham)
2024
The topic of Chapter 8 is 'nomadism', and the artists under consideration this time are Kimsooja (b. 1957) and Kyungah Ham (b. 1966). While they differ considerably in the tendencies and artistic personality of their work, they represent a kind of 'dream team' in the sense that they both practise the ethics of contemporary nomadism through their travels. Kimsooja pursues nomadic journeys based on her anthropological interests, while Ham stimulates and nurtures artistic ideas through travel. Their nomadism has nothing to do with the sentiments of historical nomads who travelled constantly from region to region to sustain themselves and satisfy their survival instincts, nor with the contemporary nomadic life that their descendants continue to follow. In addition, their nomadism appears quite removed from the lifestyle of the rapid information age, where transportation and communication developments create a constant feeling of being 'on the move', and also from the romantic Bohemians who dream of spiritual wandering and travels to foreign lands in search of a liberated life.
The nomadism of these two artists can be properly understood in the context of reflective thinking about neo-liberalism and globalism - two key issues in the later part of the twentieth century. As is well known, neo-liberalism is an economic laissez- faire approach that is critical of state interventions in the market and emphasizes the role of the market and free activities within the private sector. In addition to its positive impact in terms of the immense power enjoyed by capital and the boosting of national competitiveness, it also has negative effects in its disregard for mutually beneficial lives and redistribution at the community level - as witnessed with issues of economic downturns, unemployment, the wealth gap and conflict between developed and underdeveloped countries. This neo-liberalism has formed part of the backdrop of global tectonic shifts in conjunction with the ideas of globalism, which involves the use of global systems to seek peace for humankind, economic welfare, social justice and harmony with the environment. As both an effect and a driving force of neo-liberalism, globalism, in spite of its transnational utopian vision, has been subject to non-Western and developing countries geopolitical critiques from a postcolonial perspective. The argument here is that the 'globalization' advocated by globalism is actually a Western- centric standardization that demands a full-scale re-examination.
In response to First World globalism and its vision of transforming developing countries in accordance with Western values and standards, an alternative concept emphasizing locality at the periphery, known as 'glocalism', has emerged, where non- Western cultures respond critically to Western influences in an attempt to globally expand their own cultural contexts. This is an issue related to the neocolonialism that has persisted even after the official end of the colonial era, and to the postcolonial concern and alarm over the neo-imperialism that perpetuates unequal international relationships in terms of politics, economy and culture. This offers the possibility for linking glocalism - that is, reorganization in a decentralized manner - to the artistic nomadism of Kimsooja and Ham, who objectify themselves while also embracing others through their intellectual and moral journeys.
As this discussion suggests, the nomadism practised by the two artists has been an artistic driving force bringing together the world with the region, and the centre with the periphery. Their nomadism is also a conscious mechanism for rendering female speakers visible. In that sense, the gender-specificity in aesthetic terms suggested by Kimsooja's bottari (bundles) work and Ham's North Korean 'Embroidery Project' should be mentioned. Of course, many contemporary artists - both female and male - have employed fabric-based work and handicrafts as a new plastic language. Yet, in the case of these two artists, it is notable in the way the thematic inevitability of 'medium as message', in the Marshall McLuhan sense, is prioritized over media interest or exploration. Kimsooja's bundles originated in her examination of the traditional role of Korean women and their daily housework, while Ham's 'Embroidery Project' can be viewed as the result of a 'feminine' approach devised to communicate with people in North Korea. From this perspective, it is difficult to separate their artwork using fabric, sewing and embroidery from a thematic consciousness relating to women's culture and community spirit.
In short, it is necessary to look into the bundle and embroidery that visualize their artistic nomadism in the context of globalism. Kimsooja's bottari are physical and symbolic tokens of nomadism, and Ham's North Korean embroidery can be read as an expansion into a metaphor of movement, in which a peripheral handicraft receives renewed attention in both cultural and geographical terms. In other words, fabric/embroidery become physical signifiers visualizing the two artists' nomadic consciousnesses. It therefore stands to reason that their fabric-based work necessarily encompasses thematic meanings that extend beyond the medium itself. Their aesthetic and political bearings are fixed at a point where 'women's crafts' intersect with the issue of nomadism, and their feminist implications may be seen as lying therein.
Kimsooja's bundle-based art shows a fascinating instance of how sewing and other everyday domestic tasks traditionally performed by women - or more general practices of managing food, clothing and shelter - are conceptualized and signified in an artistic context, specifically in contemporary art.'[1] The matrix out of which the artist's pictorial fabric-based work and sculptural bundles emerged was her grandmother's traditional hanbok clothing (which the artist treasures even today) and the nostalgia associated with it, as well as memories of quilting with her mother. These artworks have grown and evolved like organisms during Kimsooja's travels around the world. First shown in 1992 during her MoMA PS1 residency in New York, her bottari works have diversified in terms of form, medium and concept over the course of many domestic and international exhibitions. Sometimes, they are personified as the artist's body or a woman's body; other times, they take on a deeper aesthetic and political sense as the formal style shifts to non-material bundles of breath and light. 'My bundles' containing personal stories have transformed into 'our bundles' confronting historical oppression and hardships, and have also expanded into public narratives that reach beyond the personal realm and become a signifier of the act of embracing in order to heal scars.
Kimsooja's bundles first came to public attention through a touring exhibition that has now become the stuff of legend: 'Cities on the Move' (1997-99). Planned by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru, the exhibition was a multi-genre art event that captured the zeitgeist of the 1990s - a time when a 'New Town' construction boom and new urban culture were in ascendancy, as Asia developed into a major geopolitical region amid the effects of neo-liberalism and globalization.[2] For this exhibition, Kimsooja presented the work Cities on the Move - 2727 KM Bottari Truck (1997), which became a milestone in her career. The performance video records her 2,727-kilometer (1,694-mile)-long journey wandering along Korean village roads beloved by her in a truck filled with bundles. With the Korean landscape passing behind her, the lonesome artist is shown only from behind in the fixed frame, sitting atop her bundles, as if in defiance of contemporary urban phenomena and the concept of progress, evoking feelings of nomadic alienation and nostalgia. Recognized as a particularly original interpretation of the exhibition's theme, the work catapulted Kimsooja to global renown virtually overnight.
Much like the departing protagonist in her work, Kimsooja left Korea in 1999 to move to New York. Recalling this experience in an interview, she said, 'It was a tremendously difficult situation, but rather than seeing the stress in this dramatic situation of casting myself out alone in the world, or defining myself as a cultural exile, my idea was to drive myself to the limits, seeing it as another future challenge.'[3] It was here at the limits - living the life of an outsider - that Kimsooja produced numerous key works of performance videos contemplating her own sense of existence and suggesting the healing role of women, such as A Beggar Woman (2000-2001), A Homeless Woman-Delhi (2000), A Homeless Woman-Cairo (2001), A Laundry Woman (2000), A Mirror Woman (2002), A Wind Woman (2003) and the well-known series 'A Needle Woman' (1999-2009).
The first work in the series 'A Needle Woman' (1999-2001) is a multi- channel performance video filmed in densely populated cities around the world. Here, too, the artist has her back to the viewer as she stands unmoving amid waves of metropolitan crowds. Her trademark mise en scène - the motionless image seen from behind, which evokes inner turmoil - is based on an existential experience that took place on a Tokyo street. As she was walking in Shibuya, she explained, there was a 'moment when I was overwhelmed by the cumulative waves of people and could only stand in [one] place', adding that the 'arrival of that overwhelming moment was the start of the "Needle Woman" and that she had the feeling of being 'erased' during her motionless performance.[4] Yet, in that very moment, she regained her peace of mind and experienced a sense of 'mediumistic' oneness with the crowd, where she became a 'wrapping cloth' ensheathing the people and a needle knitting them together. Perhaps this can be an excitement of empathizing with, feeling compassion for, embracing and welcoming the anonymous masses.
The second work in the same series was a performance video created for the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. For this work, the artist's explorations were not in densely populated cities, but in cities plagued by political and religious divisions, civil war, widespread violence and poverty: Patan, Jerusalem, Sana'a, Havana, Rio de Janeiro and N'Djamena. Presented in slow motion rather than real time, the video shows spaces that have been exploited, marginalized and rendered powerless, with the mounting, anguished sense of tension of urban catastrophe. With her silent, motionless stance, the artist has already been stripped of her sense of presence, annihilated in the slow-motion video and by abstract time like a needle that 'disappears from the place, just leaving the marks of the stitch after accomplishing its role as a medium of sewing fabric'.[5] She thematizes the light and dark aspects of globalism and neo-liberalism - that is, the chaos of alternating utopias and dystopias, the scenes of confusion where the 'First World' collides with the 'Third World', centre with periphery, global with regional, the West with Asia, stronger countries with weaker ones, the rich with the poor. By transforming herself into a needle that pierces and stitches, the artist desires to become a healer taking away the misfortunes that afflict the planet and humankind, as she also attempts to establish connections with the victims of war, migration and exile.[6]
As a continuation of 'A Needle Woman', 'Thread Routes' is a complex statement in which the artist uses her own body to weave together human beings, nature and the universe. Previously, she featured a sound performance of breaths, making a medium of the body that had been personified as a needle and bundle through the work The Weaving Factory (2004). Presented at the 1st Łódź Biennale in Poland in 2004, The Weaving Factory was inspired by a vacant former textile factory in the host city. It was conceived as a piece that would bring the works back to life by infusing the artist's own breaths and humming sounds - integrating her body with the empty building. The breathing performance drew an analogy between the repeated inhalations and exhalations and the crossing of warp and weft threads or the cyclical horizontal/ vertical structure of stitching. This was developed further into To Breathe/Respirare: Invisible Mirror, Invisible Needle, which she showed in 2006 at Teatro La Fenice in Venice. The breaths of the artist and the audience blended to envelop the theatre, which was transformed into a vessel for this ensemble of breathing: a feast of breaths and the sounds of life in place of an opera performance filled the air. For the solo presentation Respirar - Una Mujer Espejo / To Breathe - A Mirror Woman that same year at Palacio de Cristal in Madrid, she created another synaesthetic bundle through the resonance of light and breath, with a rainbow of sunlight refracted by special film across the building's glass windows to meet light reflected from mirrors on the floor, thereby enveloping the building and the bodies of those within.
If this dematerialized bundle enswathing space in breath and light can be described as a 'post-bundle', this was developed further with Kimsooja's exhibition 'To Breathe Bottari' at the Korean Pavilion of the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. Here, the artist filled the space with a rainbow of colours infinitely refracted by the special film covering the pavilion's glass surfaces. A kaleidoscopic mirroring effect was produced as this light was re-reflected by mirrors on the floor. As if in response to this spectrum of light, a sealed, anechoic chamber was set up in one corner. In terrifying pitch-blackness, the viewer heard only the sounds of their own body: breathing, coughing, a pounding pulse. Kimsooja had woven a cosmic bundle where light and deep darkness coexisted - a bundle of life, where living and death had become one.
The artist presented another resonant bundle of light and sound in 'Archive of Mind', her solo exhibition for the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul in 2016. Alongside her light-based artwork transforming the museum's courtyard into a luminescent space using the reflections created by her special film, Kimsooja showed a new sound-based work entitled Unfolding Sphere. This work culminates with Archive of Mind (2016), a ritualistic audience participation performance where viewers are invited to a large elliptical table and asked to knead lumps of clay that have been placed there, forming abstract spherical shapes as though creating human beings out of the substance. As the duet between the friction noises of the clay balls rolling on the table and Unfolding Sounds, featuring the artist's gargling sounds, ring out through the space, there is an experience of synaesthetic unity where the spherical clay bodies become one with the viewers' hands as if encircled by the artist's wrapping cloth. The message of 'Needle Woman' has been intensified and expanded as the 'bundle' symbolizing nomadism shifts from geographical to psychological space.
[...]
If there is a common theme connecting the artistic oeuvres of Kimsooja and Ham, it is 'establishing relationships'. To begin with, these relationships are conceptualized through fabric and sewing. Kimsooja views her fabric-based work - the joining of cloth - as a mechanism for inclusiveness, uniting the self with others and the and wrapping world, nature and the universe. Ham regards her 'Embroidery Project' as a personal, non-linguistic dialogue with the potential to resolve Korea's political division.
The relationship they are aiming for is driven by a contemporary brand of nomadism, in the sense that they are actually physically moving and travelling between places. Their nomadism is distinct from the so-called 'new nomads' or digital nomads freewheeling figures powered by advanced, ubiquitous technology. But the way they employ online information as a means of approaching minority populations and multicultural phenomena, restoring a lost sense of community and opening up the possibilities for a more socially participatory, interactive democratization, means they can also be seen as sharing certain sentiments with the twenty-first- century model of the 'new nomad'. The important thing is, as mentioned above, that their nomadism satisfies the proposition of glocalism, which relates to a critical awareness of Western-centred globalism and neo-liberalism. Their nomadic travels can also be defined as journeys of artistic and moral exploration, since they are pursuing new values with anthropological interests and an experimental mindset, travelling the wastelands with a 'glocal' mentality. In other words, they upend static reality and stable order through proactive movements that turn natural places into spaces of praxis, and they introduce instead a reality that is one that is transformative, alien and vague. In that in the process of formation sense, their exploratory travels can be understood as the kind of 'spatial practice' or 'performance of place' described by Michel de Certeau in his The Practice of Everyday Life (first published in English in 1984).
Through their 'performance of place', these artists make a moral decision in the interest of global coexistence, human inclusiveness, correspondence with the other, compassion, and healing in the face of contemporary disasters and cross-cultural unity. In this way, their nomadism relates naturally to 'welcoming'. The value of hospitality is found in a free and liberated spirit and an intellectual richness that is open to all. When practised in the realm of art, it can achieve astonishing reversals. Through welcoming that is free of moral controls or conditions, it is possible to go beyond the cultural and artistic limits, and to resist state ideology and political violence, doubts and hostility towards others, distrust of the natural environment, and a neo-liberal political and economic climate that views economic acquisition as the ultimate goal.
In this context, hospitality is a radical aesthetic catalyst for a new political art, one that relates to such sharp issues as localism, feminism, postcolonialism, racism, climate and the environment. The adoption of hospitality for feminism in particular can be a means of resisting racial and gender-based oppression and achieving non- Western, non-patriarchal, non-modernist art through the embracing of subalterns, such as women, the elderly and disabled people. We can observe an expanded form of feminist art through the powerful and persuasive welcoming messages to be found in the work of Kimsooja, who alludes to the role of women as healers and mediators, as well as in the work of Ham, who attempts to communicate with North Korea, thematizing political division through dialogue and a gentle artistic approach. The rationale for comprehending these two artists' work from a feminist perspective lies in the way that an inclusive welcoming, an embracing of others, including those on the margins, offers a potential means of transcending the self-centred and local-egoistic cultural limits and the linear constraints of feminism.
[Note]
[1] Kimsooja, in Woman: The Difference and the Power exhibition catalogue (Seoul: Sam Shin Gak, 1994), p. 83. 'Women's daily lives are filled with two-dimensional work, three-dimensional work, installation work, and performance art. The visual systems associated with clothing, cooking, and housing are adequate to show certain aspects of contemporary art. There is washing clothes, wringing clothes, hanging clothes, folding clothes, ironing, sewing, winding thread, sweeping, mopping, dusting, decorating, preparing food, shopping, cooking, setting tables, doing dishes, and so on and so forth. It would not be overstating things to identify the structural logic of contemporary art as being present here. It's also possible to have a concrete analysis and appreciation for all the detailed particulars. Because they are logical and also fascinating. And because there are extraordinary elements that break apart the monotony of daily experience.It is a conceptualization of everyday life or the work of women. And at the same time, it is a work of annihilating myself through that process.’
[2] More than 150 artists, architects, filmmakers and designers were involved in this exhibition, which toured large cities in seven countries: Secession, Vienna; MoMA PS1, New York; CAPC Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, France; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Hayward Gallery, London; various locations in Bangkok; and Kiasma, Helsinki.
[3] Kimsooja, interview with Yun Hyejeong, in 'Kimsooja; conceptual artist who questions life and existence endlessly', My Personal Artists (Seoul: Eulyoo Publishing Co., 2020).
[4] Kimsooja, written interview with the author, 2021.
[5] Kimsooja, in Choi Yoon Jung, 'A Needle Woman, Sacred Ritual', in Kimsooja exhibition catalogue (Daegu: Daegu Art Museum, 2011).
[6] Kimsooja, interview with Yun Hyejeong, in My Personal Artists: 'Relations extending to the body, hand, and fabric; the relationship formed between the footstep and the earth; the relationship formed between the exhalation and inhalation; the relationship between my eye and the eye in the mirror looking back at it. Is there anything in this world that is not related? Everything in our day-to-day lives in the Internet era is "stitching", and it has become difficult to extricate ourselves from this web of visible and invisible stitching.’