Kimsooja, the light-weaving, room-making conceptual artist, is an epochal ‘threader’ par excellence, and Archive of Mind (2016–2017) at the MMCA Seoul, one of her key exhibitions, epitomizes her ongoing pivottari art of planetary network and ecological knitwork.

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  1. To read Kimsooja is to follow her thread routes.

  At the center of the exhibition hall of Archive of Mind, Kimsooja constructed a large wooden table where visitors were invited to make balls of clay, whatever size and shape, and leave them there on the table. This part of the ‘show in the making', so to speak, this ingenious process in place, part of an immersive theatre within the exhibition space, automatically completed the show at the end and renders it, inevitably, incomplete.
  
  
  This structured open-endedness, punctuated by the conceptual precision of the mode of material presentation, carries the signature of the artist, who works across the globe and whose works are scattered all over the world. Her Thread Routes series of 16 mm films (2010–), for instance, are filled with seamlessly connected images of textile cultures from different parts of the world — and they, in turn, inspire me, the reader here, to see reading as a sort of radioactive threading as well. They form a marvelous mosaic of common and communal acts of sewing and weaving, mostly by women, as vividly illustrated by Chapter 4 of Thread Routes, a hypnotic series of wrapping and unwrapping, weaving and unweaving, constantly enveloping and reconnecting geometry and geology through the observant artist’s grammatical tool that is archival archaeology. This way, Kimsooja’s site-specific work -on-the-go becomes, at any given point in space and time, a concurrently unfolding (meta-)set of works in progress, which are quite literally countless except, perhaps, through her boarding passes and entry/exist records at various ports.
  
  
  It is in that vein that I offer the following series of my own ‘rolling’ (gurooneun 구르는) thoughts on the ongoing work of Kimsooja. I begin by following the intricate polysemic resonances of her gu (a ball, spherically shaped or curved, 구 ), the centerpiece of Archive of Mind, along with her gigu (the Earth 지’구’ a ‘geo-ball’), both rhyming with gu, nine, one that is promisingly incomplete, infinitely pregnant.

• 2. Kimsooja’s gong work traverses and transcodes the world, its spherical planetarity.

  Consider as a point of comparison The Dinner Party (1974–1979) by Judy Chicago at the Brooklyn Museum. There, the presence of ‘another’ 999 ‘women’ inscribed on the floor beneath the 39 virtually seated at the table, is sharply ghostly, to the point. The triangular edges of Chicago’s table make the point of it all pointedly clear, poignant. By contrast, the installation Archive of Mind by Kimsooja, a version of which is housed and still unfolding at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is elliptical, not triangular, and retrofutural rather than historical. It is non-linear, not perspectival. All the edges softened, pushed in, pulled out, rounded off, and patted on, both the table and clay dumplings, everything around there is round or becoming rounder and rounder on mimacro scales.Kimsooja’s bottari-like open-ended planetary table embodies and stages different kinds of geometric considerations, imaginations, and sensibilities, where the sporadic fluidity of the circular structure, still anchored in its semi-visible center, architecturally communicates its topological porosity as well as kinetic inclusivity. To discern the porous dynamism of this otherwise serene ‘installation,’ we need to look, and listen, under the table as well for the Unfolding Sphere (2016) there, a sound piece with thirty-two speakers and a 16-channel soundtrack, which forms a subterranean micro-telecommunity. Dried clay balls rolling and touching angled corners generate sounds which can be thunderous when there is a hard enough collision, and together with the artist’s sound performance, “grrr,” a recording of her gargling with water, the collaborative concurrency of the Archive of Mind as a communing whole becomes more multi-sensorially complex as well.
  
  
  In this cosmic pond at work that is not a pond, geometry in and of and around it becomes not only softly ‘manageable’ but audible. Geometry itself goes extradimensional. By de-angularizing, dynamizing, and polycentering the edges, by creatively deconstructing and amplifying them with a kind of gestural literalism and contingent collectivism, her table embraces an archival poignancy of political polarities and ongoing world-historical contradictions while translingualizing and translocating them. This communal table from the 2010s ‘throws out there’ while pivoting to, intersecting, tableaux, planes, or plates.
  
  
  There, on the streets of consciousness where our peripatetic artist often works, kinetic contemporaneity and participatory democracy among people as living individuals is both practiced and presented. Such is how her ‘performances’ happen and happen in real time. Cohabitational coexistence is concretely contemplated. Her methodologically naturalized nomadism, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism, in which her own reparative poethic spirit and anthropological insights are implicitly articulated, are an understated expression of her social-ethical commitment.Take her more recent project, Traversées (2020), which turns the city of Poitiers, France, into a public artistic laboratory, a utopic workshop, by creating a tapestry of her own works and those of 20 artists she invited. If the world is her stage, her stage is also in you.

• 3. Kimsooja’s intricate gong work should be read hanahana holistically.

  Kimsooja’s hanahana (hana 1 하나, one by one or one after another) and hanttamhanttam (hanttam 한 땀, one stitch after another) approach to worldly singularities shows the care with which the artist sees them not as insulated individualities but rather as coextensive with her cosmic vision for the intricately collaborative continuous whole.
  
  
  As intriguingly illustrated in One Breath (2006/2016), her first digital embroidery piece, where a segment of a soundwave from her breathing performance is sewn across the canvas, the sound of a sigh could be a sign of survival, quite literally. Each breath, a cycle of inhalation and exhalation, is not a static ‘set’ but part of a vibrating whole in flux.
  
  
  Likewise, again, Archive of Mind is a prime example, an active allegory. From a block of clay comes each ball; each one becomes 1±1 which remains 1. Each spherical object, each soft microcosm, remains and becomes part of one, materially, conceptually, performatively, numerically all at once, not unlike each ‘human’ being made of humus.
  
  
  Kimsooja’s ‘blanket’ compassion for humanity along with her ecological affinity with the universe is universal. Yet she is not a universalist in any abstract or politicized sense of the term. On the contrary, her aspirations and gestures, ever so agilely measured, get vitally concretized, trans-individuated, and practiced at each subtly coordinated ‘needle point’ of artistic imagination and activation, as diagrammatized by her early piece Structure—A Study on Body (1981), a biographical addition to Archive of Mind at the MMCA.
  
  
  This way, each gong (another word for a ball공 as in a baseball or football) becomes an embodiment of gong (blank, empty, void, vacuum 공 空) as well, part of the concept ‘space,’ ‘emptiness in between.’ Each gong deductively produced, procured, or procreated out of mu (nothing 무 無), pairable to another gong (to engineer, make, craft, fabricate, 공 工), embodies a muwee (unforced or effortless act, 무위 無爲 wuwei in Mandarin) exercise of a double gong, carefully freed-up or freely gravitational Daoist action in inaction. Each phase or stage of muwee, as archived by Geometry of Body (2006–2015), where the artist’s used yoga mat is upcycled as an avant-garde canvas that contemplates the ecologically layered and receptive temporality of an already-used object, not just Duchampian “readymade,” reanimates the invisible traces of inter-being that can be documented otherwise.
  
  
  Such a work of memory or memory-work is where mental harboring turns into existential honoring. I myself recall, quite vividly, the first time I came across a “note” by ‘early’ Kimsooja. I remember that small print on the now-yellowing page, the artist’s statement at the end of the catalog for her first solo show back in 1988 at Gallery Hyundai, Seoul. I also remember my own fascination with that last page, the second paragraph between the first that is introductory and the conclusionary third. As if stitching those two ends together, in that middle paragraph, the artist singled out that “quotidian” day in 1983, as she put it, when she suddenly had a flash of inspiration for a ‘textual’ way out of the two-dimensional canvas: she felt she had just found a way to overcome, to transcend, the flat horizontality and verticality of the otherwise static space for conventional painting. Indeed, how thrilling it must have been. I recall a kind of biogeometric vibration of the passage I myself felt, in turn, including the passage of time “folded in (내포 內包)” there as an actively archival “possibility,” as the young artist was saying. And such an otherwise passable pinnacle — a needle point of Kimsooja’s artistic intuition, where her rationality and sensibility converge — came at a moment of everyday muwee with her mother, the mother and the daughter sewing together as usual, as she pointed out. Revisiting that passage now, what I find remarkable is a curvy resonance, and virtual overlap, between that momentary episode and each random moment in Archive of Mind when each participant would make their own gong with gently focused meditative attention.
  
  
  To read Kimsooja is to tread, gently, on the roundness of her piercing vision.

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  4. And each bottari of Kimsooja’s, e.g., Deductive Objects (2016), holds itself pivotally

  Gong in the (un)making is happening all the time, and gong is what Kimsooja’s bottari makes and is made of. Turn, now, to this separate, larger-scaled gong of the artist’s own making, Deductive Object (2016), part of an ongoing series with the same conceptual title; At the MMCA, Archive of Mind presented two iterations with the same name, one indoors and the other outdoors. The Deductive Object (2016) inside the building, a live-cast sculpture of the artist’s arms in the middle of making something, performs a kinetic gong through the space shared and shaped between the thumb and the index figure in a reciprocally gestural interaction. The other Deductive Object (2016), outside the building, is an oval-shaped ball, almost an odd ball, that could look, to some, like an inflated American football. An ovoid sculpture inspired by the Brahmanda (the Indian ‘cosmic egg’) and tightly wrapped in a vivid Obangsaek (a band of the ‘five’ rainbowy ‘directional colors’ in Korean culture) fabric, it stands serenely on a mirrored plinth, like a double parody of Columbus’ egg, with no part flattened at all.
  
  
  Likewise, each of Kimsooja’s bottari tends to exist entirely on its own, yet stands in ready solidarity with any others. Her bottari is not an inductive object that can be accumulated like “one little, two little, three little” abstract “Indians” but, again, a deductive sobject, an object that stands like and turns into a subject at any agile moment. This bottari sobject as a knotted allegory of life and death on the moving walk holds — folds and unfolds — itself pivotally, like, let’s say, a pivottari. The Deductive Objects (2016) are a dual, pivotal manifestation of such self-concealing and revealing sobjectivity of a living and dying thingy, a container that cannot be contained. This ‘inoutside’ interfaciality between the two versions of Deductive Objects (2016) contributes to the exemplarity of Archive of Mind (or a ‘Geometry of Mind’ in Korean translation) as a unique placeholder in Kimsooja’s artistic trajectory, where the individual and the collective, the intensive and the extensive, hug, or hold hands, through a matrixial materialization of their intercategorical interdependence.

• 5. And moments of muwee (wuwei) are returning to Deductive Object – Bottari (2023).

  Particularly fascinating in that regard is Kimsooja’s more recent iteration of Deductive Object – Bottari (2023), an intensification of the inout-side sobjectivity of her pivottari. Her geological and geoptical navigation into the world of a measured land, namely, geometry, appears to have become more literal than ever. Taking her muwee art of site-specific making and unmaking to the next level, this time at Meridiano, an open-air gallery in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, she placed this new deductive object in the center of the square room at the gallery: a big rock she came across during her residency there, which she then painted matte black. At Meridiano, where the inside becomes outside and vice versa through the unique architectural porosity of the building, the found object reintroduced into the gallery as a kind of black hole library remains outside as well, and its nonhuman alterity unaltered. With its archaic illegibility shielded from human overfamiliarity, the rock becomes the new bottari, except that it is not exactly mobile. This time, her body alone, the bottari of her whole being, moves along, and with that, the movement becomes a moment, an event that is not only site-specific but time-sensitive.
  
  
  Kimsooja’s performative gaze at this rock pivottari is an archive meeting another archive. Back in 2016, at the MMCA, it was an archival cast of the artist’s hands that met the gaze of a deductive object across the museum wall; in 2023 at Meridiano, it is the artist’s gaze at a distance, questioning itself more directly through the other, stony gaze from the object that had already been there all along, from immemorial times. Here, this kind of Daoist anonymity and liberty, this originary namelessness, of the rock and the artist’s body (both as deductive objects wirelessly united by their nameless contingent ecological affinity), is an aesthetic imperative stronger than any rule of the game. They both become a medium, the eye of a needle, through which a new horizon of perceptions arises, a new plane opens up.

• 6. As of 2023, our planet getting close to ‘a boiling point,’ we need more lighthouses.

  Surface matters, especially if you can see it better, more deeply and broadly.
  
  
  Imagine a world about to be decimated by its own hand that can only count 1 to 10, up and down. In the increasingly digitotalized world of climate change and collateral crises, the analog (im)materiality of Kimsooja’s connective gazes and gestures are breathtakingly retrofutural. Again, the visible void in and of One Breath (2006/2016) — a gong work of art discussed earlier as an example of hanahana modus operandi — indexicalizes this zone of ‘coviving’ survival, a possibility of zero as a bridge that goes on, a transfer point that keeps things in transit. Here is a glimmer of hope, an echo from the belly of the world.
  
  
  In the tidal waves of spacetime, a push and pull of life and death, likewise, of being and non-being, light and darkness, sound and silence, and so on, creates its own kaleidoscopic dramas, as subtly sensorialized by To Breathe (2016). It was a rescaled, site-specific reinterpretation of Kimsooja’s earlier major works for the Reina Sofia’s Crystal Palace in 2006 and the Korean Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale in 2013. If we pair it now with the more microscopic, conceptual piece also at the show One Breath, we can better appreciate an epoch-heralding significance of the site-specific 2016 series To Breathe, recently reiterated at Palazzo Grassi in Venice (2023) and earlier in Leiden (2022) in the Netherlands.
  
  
  Connecting them further to another current exhibition, Weaving the Light (2023) at Cisternerne, the former water reservoirs for the city of Copenhagen (now a unique, massive underground art space), we can see how her pivottari, deductive objects, and breath works converge more expansively and fundamentally than ever. Connecting these ‘breathing’ works across the globe, we begin to sense more clearly how and why subterranean and areal/aerial mediation and meditations matter, especially now.

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  7. In Communion

  To be is to be connected. To be on, especially today, electronically or otherwise, means to find ways to stay present in the moment across various visible and invisible boundaries and walls and wires. For We Do Not Dream Alone (2020), as Kimsooja puts it, in a nod to a text in Yoko Ono’s artist’s book Grapefruit (1964), in her contribution to the first Asia Society Triennale in New York in 2020 (which had the same title). The resonance between this 2020 ‘occasional’ dream piece accompanied by To Breathe – The Flags (2012) and the preceding fugues of Archive of Mind (2017) at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice followed by the version at the Peabody Essex Museum (2018) and the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2022-2023) is immediate, both quotidian and global. She is on it, wherever she is.

• 8. In Constellation

  As shown above, all the eight works in constellation in Archive of Mind are in constellation with numerous other works in the planetary plateau of Kimsooja, as shown above.

• 9. In the KSJ Continuum

  Everything I said above will have to remain inconclusive. That is not just because Kimsooja continues to work, even more prolifically than ever, but because to be in the world of Kimsoojian art, which constantly works on the pores and ports of being, is ‘to be continued.’ Continuity is what ‘is’ somehow in a thread, a non-linear line in time, not quite a point of demonstration or presence, but something slidingly, singularily moving between points, planes of immanent transcendence. The needle, the body, is that which disappears there, yet not without consequences. Archive of Mind once entered it: That timely event is now part of a broader archive of The KSJ Continuum that is reflecting on its ripple effects.