• Bottari is the traditional wrapping cloth of Korea. Bottari, or bundle, has had many uses. Traditionally made by women of all classes of society, they were used to cover food and store things, wrap clothing, move house, or for sending as gifts and other precious items. One translation of bottari is 'wrapping luggage with a wrapping cloth'. Such cloths may be embroidered, painted, made from oiled paper, patchwork, or just plain cloth. The most popular wrapping cloths used patchwork designs, and were made from small pieces of discarded scraps. Similar to the practice of quilting, these bottaris were made by stitching patches of bright cloth onto the surface of a blanket. A simple sheet could be transformed into a colourful blanket, and later used as a bed cover. Kimsooja is a Korean artist who has deliberately chosen to work with the meanings and traditions of bottari made by ordinary people, so as to create new works of art. As the artist related to me in my interview with her:

• 'As a medium, bottari is traditionally feminine. In Korean, the expression to 'bundle up a bottari' means that a woman has lost her status in the household and has been forced out. Bottari also has significance as a container, or vessel, for carrying and transporting all sorts of goods. It can be unwrapped just as it can be bundled up, and in this regard I see our body as being, in the subtlest kind of way, a kind of bottari'. [1]

• In this essay, I will discuss some of the ways in which Kimsooja has used bottaris in her work, and also touch on some feminist elements that are implicated in her practice. My discussion can be viewed within the context and transformations that have taken place in her work since the 1980s.

• Korean women are taught from an early age to sew and develop needlework skills. Consequently, making wrapping cloths can never be separated from women's everyday life, just as the blankets and bedclothes they make are indispensable objects in daily use. As such, bottaris hold a special place for 'conveying buried memories and pain, as well as life's quiet passions'. [2] Blankets and bedclothes offer a place for rest when one is tired. As humans, we are born on a blanket and die in one. Cloth protects and decorates: it is an essential element of life. The blanket is a site for human life and a place of its joy, anger, grief and pleasure. In Korea, traditional folk belief suggests that good luck and happiness can be preserved inside the cloth. The patterns on the blanket are ornaments and symbols that encompass our aspirations, such as fertility, health and longevity. The colours also have symbolic meaning. [3]

• As I have already mentioned, Kimsooja is an artist who has visually and consciously combined tradition with contemporary art in an effective way. In my view, many contemporary artists have tried to offer new ways of working with conventional materials and concepts, whilst still retaining their traditional distinctive character, but I think none have been as successful as Kimsooja. In many works, women artists refer to the traditional labour associated with sewing and material. They introduce craft skills such as quilting and knitting into their work, and these elements have often referred to their individual lives and memories. This approach has been associated with tendencies in feminist art, but I do not think I would define Kimsooja simply as a feminist artist, although feminist traits can be found in her work.

The Works Prior to Bottari

• Kimsooja graduated from an art college and graduate school in Korea in the 1970s. At that time, 'monochrome' was the dominant form of art, along with other styles and experiments. During her studies, Kim was mainly influenced by formalism and conceptual art and, keeping these various trends of modern art in mind, her conceptual work was initially concerned with questions of 'the surface'. Although she experimented with various styles and expressions, she struggled to expand her vision and find her voice. In 1983, an incident occurred which had a new and lasting influence on her work. While sewing a blanket with her mother, Kim gained a new insight into cloth. She experienced a feeling of complete immersion in the realm of infinity. This experience led her to experiment with cloth and its surface, and resulted in a two dimensional work which she has described as follows:

• 'In the midst of a common act of sewing blankets with my mother, I had a clandestine and surprising experience in which all of my senses, thoughts and activities all coincided with one another. In this experience, I discovered the possibility that so many memories, pains and affection of life buried unnoticed so far could be connoted in it. I was totally fascinated by the lines of longitude and latitude as the basic structure of cloth; its primordial colour; the feeling of identity between the cloth and me while it was being sewn; and the curious nostalgia evoked by those things'. [4]

• While sewing blankets, Kim found a new possibility of overcoming the limits of the two dimensional surface through the process of moving the needle above and beneath the cloth, and began to use this experience in her work. Such works were significant in that they connected women's everyday life to artwork through the use of the material of cloth and the activity of sewing. Many Korean women artists use 'sewing' in their work, while others reference the human body. Kimsooja's early works use sewing as representative of these early ideas about women's work and labour. More recently, she has consciously used the body:

• 'I regard bottari as the body itself. Like bottari, which can be bundled and unwrapped, the presence of the body lingers and departs. The cloth, in my view, is like our skin'. [5]

• For me, her sewing works evoke a sense of femininity, labour and healing. However, there is also a difference between Kimsooja's early work and many other feminist art forms, since she uses fabric as a canvas, which is a surface. In addition, she uses needlework as a tool, which asks endless questions on this border of surface, trying to identify the subject and the object.

• In the 1980s, many Korean artists began to escape from the formalist, minimal monochrome art of the 1970s and related their works to social issues. They began to treat reality as a basis for a critical practice that represented social and political ideas. These practices presented a resistance to existing art activities and to the social system. The Minjoong Art movement was established by a number of Korean artists who shared these ideals. [6]

• As a consequence many artists turned their backs on the individualistic works of the 1970s and began to deal with real life, to develop a critical vision about their society and its politics. One of the great influences of Minjoong Art was that it made people think about art in terms of communication. Kimsooja's introduction of everyday life into her practice through sewing processes can be seen as a result of this influence. But she never joined the group, since she did not agree with group activism and the fixed ideas, systems and power it holds over the individual. She continued to work on pieces in which canvas and painting were replaced by cloth and sewing. Such works can be described as modernist, in that the work of sewing and cloth was done within the two dimensional surface.

• The act of sewing necessarily accompanies the material of cloth. The action is repeated across the surface above and beneath. Kim attempted to overcome the limitations of the 'surface' through repetitive horizontal and vertical stitching. Paints were applied over the colours and patterns of the cloth with brush strokes, line drawings and stitched marks. These showed the variation of space. The action of sewing enabled the artist to interact with the material of cloth. In sewing, Kim engages with the surface, simultaneously extending the space. I think that the introduction of cloth and sewing into her artwork brings the realm of the feminine into the art world, and overcomes the exclusion of ideas and practices that were prevented by modernism in a Confucian society. Kim seeks to transcend gender difference and to celebrate the universal value of the human being.

• Kim also produced collage works that used cloth and needle instead of canvas and paint. Although she added drawing or paint to the cloth in "Dans Ma Chambre" (1988), the cloth work still sticks to the square surface.

• Since the early 1990s, Kim has wrapped her objects, using the title "Deductive Object". In such works, Kim wrapped the cloth or hung it around common objects such as farming tools, sticks, ladders and laundry bars.

• These works were significant in that Kim attempted to escape materiality and the frame imposed upon it by the painting. She still called these attempts 'deductive' because she wanted to get out of her earlier inductive works, in which materials were assembled and connected by sewing. Deductive works reconfirm the structure of the object through the activity of wrapping it. As Kim has observed:

• 'With my objects, it's as though I'm bandaging a wound. I wrap the object as if I was treating a wound, and through the wrapping and bandaging, the objects are transformed into something feminine'. [7]

• The two dimensional frame of painting was left behind. A freer placement of shapes and objects on the wall was now possible. As the critic Oh Kwang Soo remarked:

• 'Even though there still remains the concept of her early paintings that are hung on the wall, most of Kimsooja's works bear strong tendency toward three dimensionality. Although still wary of the wall, Kim's work is a world of painting turning its back on reality, out of the illusion and into the direct reality. Therefore, her works got out of the concept of painting or drawing and consisted of stitching, weaving or wrapping direct materials. In these works, Kim stresses the meaning of assemblage of things rather than just sewing them together, while her early works consisted of quilts'. [8]

• This commentary suggests that Kimsooja's work deals with the relationship between the cloth and the space in addition to revealing the cloth as cloth. Cloth has a number of purposes and meanings for people, whether as blankets or as clothes. Other than a visible meaning, an invisible meaning also exists within the cloth. Ancestors of the Korean people believed in transmigrations and the invisible spirit. For these ancestors, cloth is the best material to convey the spirit. I think that Kim evokes the immaterial through the materiality of cloth. Just as she had once experienced the feeling of unity with her mother through sewing together, Kim 'converses' with an invisible being through the medium of cloth.

• In her P.S.1 studio residency in America (1992 and 1993), a series of works stretched the limits of merely experimenting with Korean material. This can be seen in one of the Deductive Object pieces made in 1993. Kim collected a large amount of cloth and transformed it into assemblages. These moved from the form of painting stuck inside the square frame to the three-dimensional form of the object, and then into space.

• "Mind and the World" illustrates this gradual development. In this oval shaped work, a pile of cloth was attached and stacked to the wall. Bamboo was connected to the pieces on the floor and on the wall. Different clothes were arranged in an oval shape and placed on the wall. Pieces of bamboo were wrapped with cloth as a supporting element. The use of bamboo reminds me of a needle form. In earlier works, this needle form was only visible as the trace of a thread it left behind, but in Mind and the World, the needle takes on multiple meanings. It connects the work and the earth, the artist's and the viewer's mind. The original function of a needle is to connect patches of cloth, but Kim uses it as a vertical force in horizontal space. All the works she made previously seem to converge, thereby establishing themselves as a new force. In my view, Mind and the World is a work of total harmony as it brings together all elements: assemblage, sewing and winding, shape and colour.

• Many "Deductive Object" works were produced and contributed to new installation practice. In the one made for the 5th Istanbul Biennale, entitled Deductive Object - dedicated to my marriage, patches of crushed cloth were pushed into the cracks of the wall in her studio, creating an autobiographical message through the use of traditional Korean clothes or cloth. For the first time, she completed a work by utilizing the whole space of her studio. Both the form of placement and the relationship between artwork and space was changed. America profoundly affected Kim's practice in several different ways. Firstly, she expanded the concept of space and secondly, bamboo stood in for the structural qualities and metaphoric possibilities of a needle form.

Bottari

• The bottari reappeared, as Kim noted:

• 'The bottari has always been around us. The bottari was in my studio even before I worked on it. I just did not notice it. Then, when I happened to turn my face accidentally in the P.S.1 studio, the bottari was there. I myself did not notice the patches of cloth wrapped in a bottari that I had intended to use for cloth work. That bottari was a totally new one. It was surely a sculpture and a painting'. [9]

• Having abandoned the idea of placing cloth only within a frame, Kim wrapped a variety of objects, placing them on the floor and the wall. Although similar to the artist Christo in terms of the action of wrapping, Kim's wrapping work stresses the connection with everyday experience.

• The bottari was defined as crossing the boundary between painting and sculpture. Kim's work was no longer a matter of form and composition but began to unfold in a different dimension, in much the same way Marcel Duchamp could no longer be a futurist painter after inventing the readymade. Bottari, however, is an ambiguous object that cannot be construed simply as a readymade. Unlike the transformation of industrial products, such as bicycle wheels or toilets, into works of art as a result of the artist's choice, signature and exhibition, there is no boundary between the bottari as a work of art and as a common object. [10]

The Essence of Bottari

• The common function of bottari is twofold. They are used for official functions and ceremonies, and by ordinary people to store, wrap, and carry things when on the move. Kimsooja's bottari works embrace the activity of wrapping as a sign of being on the move, as well as functioning as a 'real' bottari containing patches of cloth. The bottari in this context occupies an ambiguous position between life and art.

• The bottari installed in a villa, contemporary gallery, museum, or outside in the world takes on very different meanings (see colour plate 9). The bottari is temporal in character. It is tied with bedclothes, but inside there are used clothes. Clothes contain individual memories, stains and smells, and the artist's experience, and exist as a part of the body. In human life, clothes have dual aspects of protection. They protect us from the cold and danger, and signify the wearer's taste. The activity of wrapping up clothes into a bottari can be interpreted in many ways. To wrap up means protection and confinement at the same time. The confinement signifies severance from the outside world. To wrap up also signifies a women's status in Korean society. As if wrapped up, Korean women are confined in the name of protection. The artist sees these blankets and bedclothes as places on which we are born and die, a foundational field which is the frame of our lives. To women, a blanket is a comfortable resting place during the night, while being related to the bed in a sexual sense as well. Women give birth to children on a blanket. Thus, it is a space where women continue human history. The blanket was also a symbol of oppression by Confucian morals and strict social ideology during the Chosun Dynasty (1392 - 1910). Within a social hierarchy that privileged men, women found pleasure and emotional survival through their needlework. Sewing was one of the few accepted activities that they could do. In a society in which the expression of colour was prohibited, Korean women used colour to decorate their blankets and bedclothes, and communicate their hope. At a time when bright colours were not allowed in ordinary life, the blanket could be as brilliant in colour as the women liked.

• In her more recent work, Kimsooja allows bedclothes and blankets to take on a meaning of 'invitation'. By spreading a blanket across a table in a public restaurant, Kim's work quietly sneaks into the ordinary life of people eating and talking, outside the confines of a domestic interior. To place a bedcover on an eating table can be read as an attack on traditional custom. In Confucian society, men and women eating together in public was strictly taboo. They lived in separate quarters and the kitchen was located within the women's area. In Kim's 'used bedcover' work, the blanket acts as a sign of resistance against this convention. In this respect, I think Kimsooja is an example of an artist who questions convention and, by doing so, reveals the expressive power of an ordinary object such as bottari. I believe that Kim's life experience is accurately represented in the bottari. The conservative Confucian tradition, which influenced her youth, finds expression in her work. In the shade of men, Korean women are like shadows without existence. Women are responsible for domestic economy and Kim's work evokes something for me about middle aged women, (rather than women in general), and the renunciation of femininity. In other words, women appear as maternal beings who embrace and cure everything. Now the bottari no longer stays in a gallery environment, but is moved onto the top of a truck, into nature or becomes a shrine. In A Laundry Field, Sewing into Walking, Looking into Sewing, Kim hung bedcovers with laundry clips as if hanging real laundry. This bedcover installation occupied the whole space, and could be viewed from various angles. The work was used as a stage ornament for a dance performance. [11]

Video Works

• Bedcovers and bottari are used as signs of a metaphorical and literal journey in Kimsooja's video works. In 1997, she traveled from Seoul through several other Korean cities, before returning again to Seoul. The journey took eleven days, and many bottari were loaded on the truck.

• In Cities on the Move - 2727 KM Bottari Truck, the meanings of 'migration' and 'origin' are extended, as Kim traveled and 'performed' around the whole country. The video made en route was shown in Cities on the Move, an exhibition organised by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru. As I note from the title of the show, this whole curatorial project dealt with the topic of nomadism. Cities on the Move - 2727 KM Bottari Truck encapsulates two themes: the artist's memory of her early days when she had to move constantly (her father was a military man), and her current experience of traveling all over the world for artistic projects. This is a journey of body and soul together, and a journey into the memory and the past.

• Usually a journey is a movement between places, but Kimsooja's journey shows the travel of time through the transition of places. The vertical concept of time is added to Kim's journey so that the journey in general becomes a linear movement between places. A similar work was made for the Venice Bienniale in 1999. Kim's Bottari Truck is both a symbol for her journey to other cities and other worlds, and a comment on those displaced from their homelands. She identifies the bottari with herself. She faces herself in the front mirror of the truck, and confronts her past experiences. In all her video works, the identification with 'the journey into the other world' is constantly visualised.

• In a video piece that records a performance in Delhi, Kim ended her identification with the bottari and made herself a needle sewing the earth, that is, A Needle Woman. This work shows how Kim identifies herself with the needle (see colour plate 10). She conceptualises the activity of sewing. While considering this activity as 'breathing or communication', she identifies walking and staring with sewing. Mind and the World was the first work in which this concept of sewing was stressed. In Sewing into Walking, Kim herself is a needle, connecting the bedcovers on the ground with the earth. In her video works, Kim deploys used clothes, bottari and video monitors to connect the exhibition space and the viewers with the activity of sewing. The artist has said, 'previously thread and needle sewed cloth whereas this time my body is a medium that sews wide cloth that is nature'.

• As we can see in this remark, Kim's needlework has evolved from the actual activity of sewing into conceptual sewing, revealing the relationship of intertwining without thread and needle. The artist sews the common life, environment and nature with her own body. This action replaces the needle. A needle can also be a tool that hurts, but it can be also be a tool that cures, as in Oriental medicine.

• Kim is a needle that connects the body and the soul. Although the needle connects, it does not leave its trace. Kim herself becomes a needle to remove her own being. The responses of passersby are diverse: the pedestrians in Tokyo look totally disinterested; the occasionally looking back Chinese in Shanghai appear to be curious; and the Indians stop and stare at the artist. The artist is a needle that continues to sew her with passersby. In the repeated sewing, the artist disappears and nothing remains.

• In A Laundry Woman – Yamuna River, India, made in India in 2000, Kim's empty state of mind appears more emphasized. In one scene, Kim meets the souls, as the remains of a burnt dead body passes by in front of her in the Yamuna River. Kim's body is slowly assimilated into the river. She is free from all thoughts and ideas and goes into a different state of mind. As in all her video works, her activity is minimal. Many stories are condensed as her works change from the bottari to the needle and then to nature. Kim once sewed the world with her body as medium, but now she tells us another story with her eye and mind. As Rosalind Krauss has observed, the real medium of video art is not the mechanical apparatus but the psychical circumstance. In Kim's video work, one can feel the state of being nothing and experience the correspondence with nature without any skill. [12]

• In conclusion I believe that Kim positions her itinerary between life and death. She sees each sewing stitch as an endless itinerary. She is the needle that travels across the cloth. She once discovered this while sewing blankets with her mother, and then overcame the limitation of the two dimensional surface by sewing onto a blanket. In a progressive variation of bottari works, Kim developed the concept of journey or migration into Cities on the Move - 2727 KM Bottari Truck, then she evolved into A Needle Woman, and finally in her video works the needle is identified with the body. The thread has continuity and circularity. This aspect of continuity and circularity of life is apparent in her work. This also signifies transmigration in Buddhism.

• Kimsooja's journey is not over yet.

• This first solo New York exhibition by Korean artist Kim Sooja featured recent videos, but her work is really a mixture of video, performance, sculpture (involving Kim's own body) and private acts of meditation in outdoor public spaces. The centerpiece was A Needle Woman (1999 — 2001), for which Kim traveled to eight major population centers — Cairo, Delhi, Lagos, London, Mexico City, New York, Shanghai and Tokyo — only to stand motionless, with her back to the camera, on downtown thoroughfares packed with pedestrians and sundry vehicles. At P.S.1, the silent videos of these actions, taken from a stationary camera several yards behind Kim, were projected on the walls of one large hall. Wearing a simple gray dress, Kim stands amid human motion and commotion, as people surge toward her and around her. Sometimes she seems about to be overwhelmed, perhaps even struck or otherwise menaced, and you fear for her safety. At other times, she is a strong enigmatic presence who simply waits in one place while everyone else goes every which way.

• Always visually lush, these videos tap into the uneasy relationship between the individual and mass society, the dislocation of being a foreigner engulfed by another culture, and questions of how to maintain one's own equilibrium in a swirling, destabilizing world. Even though you never see Kim's facial expression, it is clear that her actions required courage and intense inner vitality. Throughout everything, she exudes a patient acceptance and a spiritual calm which is deeply affecting. Also part of the performance is the life of the streets — i.e., hundreds of anonymous people striding, pedaling or driving toward Kim, then disappearing from view: on-the-go New Yorkers too preoccupied to notice, multiethnic Londoners yammering into cell phones, Shanghai residents stealing surreptitious glances.

• What's particularly impressive is how such minimal actions on Kim's part result in provocative portraits of the different cities. In Tokyo, Kim is so completely ignored that she could be a ghost, and you can't help but think how the Korean minority in Japan has long suffered from cultural invisibility and discrimination. Just the opposite is Lagos, where people cluster around her with a lively curiosity.

• Also included in the show were videos of related actions, sometimes projected and sometimes on monitors. Lying on her side in Cairo while surrounded by staring men and young boys, Kim becomes a female "other" par excellence, her unobtrusive yet bewildering behavior confounding the onlookers. As she stands on the bank of the Yamuna River in Delhi, the river lows from left to right, its surface festooned with slow-moving flotsam. This is garbage moving past, but you think of memories passing, of wishes and losses, the dazzling scraps of a life. Kim Sooja's unassuming actions really draw you in with their complex and evocative power.

• An art form of chameleonesque elasticity, video can adapt to a bewildering variety of formats, from tiny television monitors to whole-wall, wraparound projections. It can mimic narrative approaches from real world documentation to surrealistic montage to Hollywood-style fantasy, and it can readily absorb the colors and patterns of digital abstraction.

• Still, as the works of Kim Sooja demonstrate in "A Needle Woman", on view at P.S. 1, one of video's most effective uses in the gallery is the creation of rectangular pictures on the wall — like old-fashioned photographs or paintings, but with moving parts.

• Ms. Kim, who was born in South Korea in 1957 and moved to New York in 1998, uses video with bare bones directness yet uncommon elegance to document her quietly provocative performances. In each of her works, the artist stands, sits or lies very still with her back to the camera while the world around her rushes by. The best have a surprising emotional impact.

• In the main installation, eight projections show Ms. Kim standing on busy sidewalks in different cities: New York, Cairo, Tokyo, London, Mexico City, New Delhi, Shanghai and Lagos. Pedestrians hurry by while this enigmatic, unprepossessing figure with a long black ponytail stands like a statue, a motionless stone in a river of humanity.

• Most people ignore her; some glance at her quizzically; some stop and stare or take pictures. In Lagos, mischievous children study her as though considering what they might do to get a rise out of her.

• The tension between the colorful, all-over busyness of the crowd and the stillness of the central figure makes these works captivating pictorially and as a real-time narratives.

• In addition, the still woman has a mythic and curiously melancholy presence. She might be the lost soul of globalized modernity.

• Two other large projections in other galleries shift the setting from city to country. In one, we look down from a slightly perspective onto the artist, who stands with her back to us facing a glassy, slowly flowing river. Spatially this is the most interesting of Ms. Kim's works because the reflective surface of the river appears at first to be far away; then you realize it is almost at the artist's feet. The collapse of distance is breathtaking.

• In the other video, the artist reclines on her side on the rocky summit of a hill holding still as clouds drift slowly by. Both videos have a soothing, meditative effect.

• The image of the lone artist facing cosmic spaces calls to mind the lone wanderers that Casper David Friedrich painted, and video adds the dimension of time. Just as the protagonist in the video contemplates the flow of time in nature, viewers in the gallery contemplate the flow of time not only as represented in the video by flowing water or shifting clouds, but also in the real-time flow of the video itself. And again, as in the artist-in-the-madding-crowd videos, the centered figure embodies an inspirational equanimity of spirit in the face of what must lead, after all, to death.

• Ms. Kim goes wrong in a piece called "A Beggar Woman" that she performed in Nigeria. At P.S. 1 a video monitor shows her sitting cross-legged on a patch of public ground holding out one hand as if begging for money. Some people put money into her hand; one man steals money out of her hand. While the image of the beggar is not without resonance and the events captured by the camera are not without interest, the element of deception is troubling. Unlike the other works, in which the artist's enigmatic presence casts no judgment on the crowd, this one shines a light of moral inquisition on passerby, implicitly questioning their relationship to people in need; yet the artist herself is behaving with an ethically questionable duplicity.

• One wonders where Ms. Kim might go from here. Can — or should — she venture beyond this one idea of the motionless, anonymous woman in tension with worldly movement? Might new performance ideas lead to new formal possibilities? Repeated too often, the performance of motionlessness could start to seem like a gimmick, but who knows? Maybe it could be extended and deepened through ritualistic repetition into a powerfully spiritual enterprise.

• A tied bundle, something 'saved' in both the objective and metaphorical sense, arouses the same simultaneous attraction and curiosity as a body lying on the ground. To grasp the knot that holds the enveloping cloth together would reveal the enigma of what was concealed within, the story of the bundle and its origin. It is likely the story of a passage, a story of departure, travel, and arrival. Not least, the bundle, whether reference or literary motif, is an archetype deeply anchored in the consciousness of nearly everyone. When the hero of a novel resolutely girds himself, 'ties his bundle', it marks a dramatic turning point in the course of the story. The form of this putatively simple baggage, reversible at any moment, stands for an open process, a complex anticipation of what is to come. It can be a condensate of life, fully functional for some other life-space, or life-time.

• Kim Sooja designates the exuberantly bright and richly patterned cloth bundles she has been presenting in ever more varied contexts and constellations since 1992 as bottari, the Korean term for 'bundle'. Despite the recent upheavals and electrifying renewal in her South Korean homeland, tied bundles of cloth, as before, are used like ordinary containers for the safe-keeping or transportation of a family's worldly goods. They are not meant for a family's valuables or heirlooms, but for the most elementary household goods with which to make a start in another place.

• Getting under way, lingering, leading a nomadic existence, or settling are central categories of human life that the instantaneity of our present-day means of transportation allows us to barely comprehend. Elsewhere, alongside travel that affords even tourists the extreme luxury of a trip around the world, endlessly slow and arduous journeys are undertaken. Though reflecting on the nature of the journey, the play of associations around the bottari is decisively influenced by the composition of the surrounding space, especially the ground. Unlike the neutral floor of a gallery, a rough, inhospitable surface like that of the Museumplatz at the Sprengel Museum in the city of Hannover, Germany. reminiscent of cobblestones, leads one to think rather of those people who carry all their possessions with them on foot. It recalls the forced mobility of those who, because of political or ethnic persecution, illness, ecological disaster or financial ruin, were able to save only their skins, and a bundle. Promoted from implement to art-object and presented in a museum, Kim's bundles become symbols of the restive or restless, the stateless, uprooted, and uninvited, of the stranger or foreigner. Rolled up in the artist's bottari are the cast-off clothes of many people unknown to us.

• The pieces of clothing are stand-ins for the people whose second skin they once were. They have little to do with brave heroes in novels. Kim, whose comments display a perceptibly extraordinary capacity for empathizing with other people and their way of life, has herself expressed her compassion for "the anonymous victims of heroism, hierarchy, penury, rigid ideas, discrimination, ignorance and untruth in our society." [In a 1998 e-mail to curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist for Cities on the Move artist's book, and in the exhibition catalogue, Kunsthalle Bern, 2001.] Here she is no doubt thinking of the history of her own South Korean homeland. Furthermore, with her ambulatory, transportable bundles, she has succeeded in calling forth a reflection on the connection between movement and consciousness, knowledge, time and space. Thus linked to the existential themes of flight and migration, the question of freedom and coercion comes into play.

• In 1997, Kim, herself profoundly marked by the constant moving of her family, crossed her homeland in a truck to the bed of which she had lashed a mountain of her bottari. This 11-day travel-performance, Cities on the Move - 2727 Kilometers Bottari Truck, has been captured in several video works. They show Kim enthroned above her mountain of bundles, gazing in the direction of her movement, granting us only a view of her from the back. As the camera follows the moving truck, always from the same distance, relations seem to reverse: it is the traveler who strikes us as immobile within a landscape that in turn seems set in motion. A sound-version of Cities on the Move has a voice-over of the artist almost imploringly reciting the names of the places she passes through. Yet the question of the beginnings, end, and purpose of the journey increasingly fades the longer one views it. The trip becomes a journey through Somewhere and Everywhere. A detailed perception of the landscape flowing by gives way to a dazed one, as if some filter had been slipped in; this is what may constitute the addictive potential of traveling. Perhaps this daze, so typical of traveling, is protection against the troubling movement of something that generally appears immobile. It makes it possible to concentrate on one's own interiority and on the now freed stream of thought.

• It is precisely through the use of materials like cloth and clothing, classically denoted as female, that Kim raises the question of the role of woman. Traditionally, women have been the adversary of movement, that is, classified under domesticity and 'keeping'. The previously used bedcovers the artist uses are sewn by Korean women for their families. A viewer socialized in Western culture could only guess that their patterns, colors, and composition may have special meaning. Accompanying the life-cycle of a human being, a couple, or a family, they bedeck the bed as the place of love, of sleeping and dreaming, a place of witness, childbearing, suffering, and dying.

• Consequently, these rounded bundles, so tempting to the touch, do not at first evoke the impression of intense corporeality or intimacy. But contact with a soft, smooth, clinging material like cloth is itself body-related, connected to its extending motions. No one can tie a bundle with just one hand, in the words of an African proverb. To spread out and gather up, shake out and hang up, smooth out, crease, cover, wrap, arrange in bundles or piles — these are ancient, at times ritual, manners of handling cloth, and precisely the ones Kim employs in her art. Whether she places the bottari cloths directly on the ground like carpets or spreads them out like tablecloths, they turn into inviting gestures. When she hangs her cloths on a line, as in her installation A Laundry Field - Sewing into Walking, Looking Into Sewing (1997), she refers to an everyday behavior in exhibitions, but one which in itself is seldom conscious. Nothing is more suitable than a weekly domestic textile exhibition in the yard for initiating oneself into meta-linguistic levels of information and communication or social recognition and differentiation.

• Kim undertakes dealing with cloth, needle, and thread in an ordinary way, but raises it to the level of a concept. Thus, sewing along with her mother was not only an initiatory experience that showed the artist, who studied painting at the arts academy in Seoul, a way of going beyond the two-dimensional canvas to object and space. An idea, far-reaching both for herself and for the viewers of her work, manifests itself in her self-conceived role as 'A Needle Woman' — that of sewing as an interaction in space, sewing as a social behavior that endlessly constructs new and more or less unstable living-spaces. There is a beguiling, even entrapping note in this idea, as when we tighten the bonds of friendship or weave a web of relations. Kim's obsessive travels are the weaving of such a net, for only movement makes bonds and separation clearly perceptible. In just this way, materials influence our feelings of closeness and distance. In different metropolises like Shanghai, Tokyo, New York and New Delhi, she has repeated a performance where she stands with almost unreal rigidness facing passers-by who flow past her as if she were a rock in a stream. Gazing on the back of the artist, viewers watching a video of Kim's performance also look these people, who react in various ways, right in the face. For a moment Kim touches on those invisible spaces in which all individuals establish themselves, and in which they move according to a behavioral plan that is seldom intuited.

• For Kim, bottari are a 'body of her own', "a self-contained world — but one which can contain everything like a vessel, materially and conceptually, since one can tie up a bundle without revealing the contents." [The artist, in an e-mail to the author, 2001.] In a museum context, the bottaris, carefully fashioned into a temporary unit and arranged in the space, become a cause for reflecting on the concrete themes of travel and migration. The constellations of many bundles, site-related and thus different every time, create a unity of multiple elements. Yet each individual bundle is a unity that comprises numerous parts. An everyday act, rolling up and spreading out squares of cloth, comes to symbolize the inextricable interplay of concentration and diffusion that permeates every sphere of human thought and action, and of the cosmos and nature.

• The bundle, which in other contexts appears to be an example of clustering, condensing, and compromising, is a generative ordering principle that augments our knowledge. It is no doubt indissociable from its contrary movement, that of expansion. Thus, matter or energy highly compressed entails a simultaneous loss of spatial extension. Extensions take up space, but thereby lose strength and tensility. This is well known as a physical or chemical phenomenon, as in the concentrations of ingredients in liquids. Our present-day view of the world would be unthinkable if natural scientists were unable to tie together bundles of objects and phenomena, and to formulate valid and useful laws about them, without having to know the individual parts of those bundles. As a strategy for human behavior, a directed action is comparable to a bundle. It conflicts with widely scattered initiatives. We are endowed with an emotional state, the capacity for inner concentration, along with a wide-ranging attention. Thought-processes may precipitate as long brainstorms or intensely pointed hypotheses. Bundling is the human ability to bring together perceptions, information, and thought into momentarily useful complex units, then to return them back into the flow of things. Only in this way is orientation within the infinite plenitude of individual phenomena possible for us.

• Bottari is everywhere, body and mind, womb and tomb, globe and universe, bundle of a bundle of bundle folding and unfolding our mind and geography, time and space... [In a 1998 e-mail to curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist for Cities on the Move artist's book, and in the exhibition catalogue, Kunsthalle Bern, 2001.] So in Kim's concept of bottari there is not merely the superposition of an intense, sensually perceptible metaphorics of the body onto the all-pervasive phenomenon of mobility. It is interwoven with moments of Asian and Western culture, the everyday and art, past and present. On this mental voyage the artist herself has even managed to think up an interpenetration of the motifs of 'bundle' and 'planet'. For her, each bundle is in a certain sense "like a planet, for example, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto — like the lucky sign of our destiny which indicates the differing character of human longing." [The artist, in an e-mail to the author, 2001.]