• An artist is not an isolated system. In order to survive he has to continuously interact with the world around him…Theoretically there are no limits to his involvement – Hans Haacke

• Interacting with the world around her is precisely what Kimsooja does throughout her work. Since the early eighties, she has relied on the power of the needle, literally and metaphorically, as a means of expressing the direct interaction between art and life. This is the golden thread that binds her work together. Although educated as a painter in Seoul with a short printmaking scholarship in Paris, Kimsooja quickly discovered the unique possibilities associated with the use of needle and fabric as opposed to brush and canvas. She first discovered fabric as a powerful artistic medium, as a young girl, while sewing a bedcover with her mother. The act of stitching through the surface with a needle made her mind wander; philosophy, artistic process, and history all seemed to converge with the fabric.

• When she first began sewing, Kimsooja wanted to overcome the limited surface of painting by reaching to the other side. She was drawn to the idea of getting in and beyond the membrane of cloth with a needle, and subsequently realized the significance of sewing as a process of wrapping fabric with threads. Kimsooja was intrigued by the continuous and mesmerizing back and forth action involved in sewing, and its inherent creative or mending purpose. From the outset, the process of sewing allowed her to identify herself with the object being sewn, which simultaneously represented an extension of the self. With needle and thread in hand, the mind can wander while the hand goes through the motions of a precise and monotonous craft. Quite simply, Kimsooja had discovered the possibility of sewing meaning into life.

• From the start, the cultural relevance of traditional Korean cloths has been an integral aspect of Kimsooja’s work. The fabrics implemented throughout her work function as powerful traces of the countless personal stories that, when purposefully brought together, speak of the ultimate interconnectedness of all humanity. Her fascination with the formal structure of fabric and the implications of the needle and thread moving through its surface translate to a silent conversation with the fabric, one that also involves an investigation of issues related to craft and traditional women’s roles. Kimsooja’s earliest works involved collage-like techniques that were, for the most part, more formal than conceptual. These delicate, sewn works hinted at important aspects that would unfold in later work. For example, a plain beige t-shirt decorated with roughly sewn patches of red, yellow and green fragments of clothing comprises a study in color, form and composition, and an underlying meaning is woven into the loose threads and rough unfinished edges. While patchwork, quilting, needlework and stitching are implemented in textile works that speak of pain, loss and vulnerability, sewing itself is simply a means of expression, not the end goal. Through the years, Kimsooja’s approach to sewing has become increasingly conceptual; the complete absence of thread or fabric in some works is as important as the bright textiles featured in other works. The power of sewing as metaphor, and the symbolism associated with a sewing needle in particular, relate to universal issues of identity and existentialism that tie all of Kimsooja’s work neatly together.

• Kimsooja’s Deductive Object series from the early nineties is also highly indicative of later developments in her work, particularly in terms of the possibilities associated with conveying life stories through common objects. For this series, Kimsooja made use of culturally specific everyday items, such as kites, reels, shovels, forks, or window frames that she wrapped with swatches of Korean bedcovers and clothes, in works that pushed formal and conceptual boundaries. These ‘already-mades’[1] are strongly linked to issues of domesticity and women’s labor, and are rich with social, cultural and aesthetic implications. In her work with found objects, and bedcovers in particular, Kimsooja stresses that she is most interested in the fact that the cloth or objects are ‘pre-used’ rather than ‘pre-made’. The history of the cloth as connected to its owner is underlined, rather than the significance of the anonymous person who may have sewn the bedcover in the first place. The soul, aura and memory of the objects and fabrics she uses are of utmost importance, both spiritually and conceptually.

• Kimsooja subsequently widened the context of her Deductive Object series by placing emphasis on how the objects relate to the surrounding space. In 1993, she had an important exhibition at PS1 in New York, and one particular installation really stood out. As is so often the case with Kimsooja, ‘complex simplicity’ is precisely what makes the work so powerful. Imagine a white washed brick wall, scattered with small holes, the kind of exhibition wall that most artists and curators would want to smooth out or cover up. Kimsooja engaged directly with this wall, in a beautiful introduction to the idea of sewing as intervention. Hiding in the cracks of the wall, and nestled between the threads of the work, are some very important clues about the direction that Kimsooja’s work was taking – sewing into life. The colorful scraps of fabric scattered around the wall play with the concept of sewing, as each hole in the wall relates to the eye of a needle metaphorically threaded with tiny pieces of cloth. While the overall pattern echoes a textile work in progress, the true essence of the work lies in the space in between, in the connection between the invisible threads that join humanity together. By placing emphasis on metaphor rather than material, Kimsooja reveals the bare threads of her ongoing investigation of existential issues while simultaneously embracing and challenging the possibilities connected with textiles and the practice of sewing.

• In the early nineties, Kimsooja started making bottari, and the underlying conceptual issues that bring art and life together became even more evident. This raised her work to an entirely new level. Kimsooja gained international recognition for these colorful fabric bundles made from traditional Korean cloths, used to wrap and carry one’s possessions. Although bottari can be made using any kind of fabric, Kimsooja intentionally uses abandoned Korean bedcovers made for newlyweds that she subsequently wraps around used clothing. As such, her use of bottari involves a fascinating double entendre. The bottari function as art objects that relate directly to the Korean tradition of wrapping ones possessions, conveying the idea of being on the move, while also functioning as real bottari that contain something of personal value. A perfect balance between pure form and function, they are beautifully situated on the boundary between art and life. Kimsooja’s interest in bottari also signaled a logical transition from a painterly interest in surface planes to the use of fabric as sculptural mass. This gradually led to a more abstract realm, where sewing is implied within the context of various spaces and environments. So, although she had started out with a traditional needle, Kimsooja freed herself from being bound by the needle by purposefully, yet almost imperceptibly, deconstructing the process of sewing, to the extent that the connection to a needle, thread or fabric eventually becomes barely discernable. Ultimately, all that is left in relation to real sewing are conceptual traces of the needle, or the metaphor of a needle as a tool of empowerment and liberation.

• With or without a needle and thread, Kimsooja relays captivating stories through art that relates to life as it relates to the concept of sewing. Sewing as an artistic process, sewing as a quiet contemplative activity, sewing as a conversation with the surface of fabric, sewing as a formal investigation, sewing as a meditative process, sewing as it relates to traditional women’s roles, sewing as craft, sewing as intervention, sewing as wrapping, and sewing as a connective act, are all part of the complex fabric of Kimsooja’s singular artistic approach. Reflections about life and art are spun from a seemingly endless thread that weaves in and out of time and space, where past, present and future are melded into one.

• Around the same time that Kimsooja realized that she could use bottari to effectively express the notion of the totality of art and life, Suzi Gablik was investigating similar themes in her research about connective aesthetics. What Gablik would describe as participative, empathetic and relational modalities of engagement are the defining factors of Kimsooja’s approach to art. Gablik’s theory of connective aesthetics, as outlined in her book The Reenchantment of Art, reads almost as an ode to Kimsooja’s artistic practice. If art should somehow help us to understand our place in the world, if art should work beyond its immediate role as an object and truly relate to our own existence, Kimsooja certainly provides the kind of approach that Gablik was interested in. Mindfulness, consciousness, compassion, and empathy are words that consistently appear in Gablik’s writing, and these words also come to mind in relation to Kimsooja’s practice. Gablik’s search for an enveloping relational vision that would embrace a feminine approach is definitely found in Kimsooja’s work. As Gablik writes, “The sense of everything being in opposition rather than in relation is the essence of the old point of view, whereas the world view that is now emerging demands that we enter into a union with what we perceive, so that we can see with the eyes of compassion.” [2] Twenty years later, Kimsooja’s art is as compassionate and relevant as ever.

• In retrospect, we can see the visible and invisible traces of an artistic practice that has been consistently defined by a very conscious and determined use of the same materials or approach, set within different contexts where new layers of meaning emerge with each new project. The intricate pattern of Kimsooja’s work is created from a needle that keeps pointing towards concepts that are as fluid as they are static, simultaneously material and immaterial, visible and invisible, simple and complex. Louise Bourgeois once said that fibers, whether spun by spiders or created on a spinning wheel, have deep significance, and that threads weave important memories and emotional connections for us all. This truly captures the essence of Kimsooja’s fascination with the stories that are permanently imbedded in the fabrics that have provided an ongoing source of artistic and even spiritual inspiration for Kimsooja.

• Through the years, Kimsooja’s bottari have appeared in many different contexts around the world, almost magical in the way they fit into almost any gallery space or natural environment. Like seasoned world travelers, Kimsooja’s bottari are constantly on the move; whether in a museum space or a forest, appearing in multitudes, or all alone, they have been arranged in a meticulously arranged row, or strewn about in a more chaotic manner, they have remained completely still, or moved 2727 kilometers on a truck. With each new setting, added depth and meaning unfolds.

• In beautiful contrast to the bottari, Kimsooja is equally renowned for her textile installations where the bedcovers are unwrapped, unfolded, laid out, or carefully hung in gorgeous labyrinths of shiny, vibrant fabric. The vividly colored textile work A Laundry Woman, 2000, is a perfect example of this approach. On entering the installation, the viewer is completely surrounded by textiles and is invited to walk through an intricate web of color where pattern and meaning converge. Kimsooja has often compared sewing and walking as similar activities, and describes how this first came about, “In 1994, I started connecting my body as a symbol of a needle in the moment that I was viewing the documentary footage of my daily working process undertaken at Oksanseowon Valley near Kyungju, Korea. I decided to make this as a video performance piece called Sewing into Walking - Kyungju. I identified this walking process in nature—the collecting and gathering of all these bedcovers—as a symbolic needlework which my body was serving.” [3] To walk through A Laundry Woman is to understand the inherent communicative power of textiles, and the underlying meanings are seemingly endless. With each step, as with each stitch, the viewer is one step closer to understanding the metaphysical aspect of work. In this case, the viewer plays the metaphorical role of the needle, winding in and out, betwixt and between these gorgeous fabrics that have a story to tell. The specific choice of decorative Korean bedcovers as intimate possessions that tell life stories of pain, loss, love, and desire is, of course, as significant as ever. These fabrics, colored by cultural and personal histories, are narratives that are literally left hanging for the viewer to unravel as they delicately float between the worlds of art and craft.

• In Kimsooja’s work, each project is inextricably bound to the thread of the next project. From project to project, the conceptual thread is picked up and re-sewn into a complex and interwoven vision of reality. A perfect example of this is seen in the similarities and differences between A Laundry Woman and A Mirror Woman, 2002. These works appear to be quite similar, both formally and conceptually, and they both relate to a wide range of existential issues; yet the simple addition of mirrors that cover the walls is all it takes to set these works dramatically apart. The mirrors contribute to a heightened sense of infinite space, thereby shifting the focus from the immediate reality of the viewer’s experience to an endless space that can be understood as relating more to the universe than the individual. Similar to separate threads in an intricate piece of fabric, even if they don’t touch each other, they are still bound to the same fabric, and every single thread plays an equally important role in contributing to the overall effect. These works are cut from the same cloth, and stand as powerful symbols for the place of each individual in the universe. The message is abundantly clear; without a needle there would be no fabric, without each individual, no fabric of society.

• As we follow the needle to its most abstract form, the significance of sewing as metaphor becomes abundantly clear. A needle is easily understood as an extension of the body, and nowhere is this more evident than in the two-screen video installation A Needle Woman, 1999 where the needle moves in a completely theoretical direction. In one projection Kimsooja stands motionless within various urban environments; in the other she lies immobile on a rock. The two projections create a compelling dialogue of opposites typical of her work in general. In the bustling city streets of Tokyo, Shanghai or Delhi, her role is non-changing; she stands alone, straight as a needle. She sews herself into the fabric of society, disappearing periodically just as a needle would. In the accompanying projection she lies upon a colossal rock in natural surroundings. In contrast to the fast paced city scenes, the only changing elements are the drifting clouds against a clear blue sky, and subtle nuances of light. Clearly, Kimsooja is a metaphor for the needle—she connects two parts and in the end disappears. Her role, or the role of her body, is to interact with the fabric of society and to direct our focus; then she disappears, just as a needle does after it’s job is done.

• In A Needle Woman the body is understood as a needle within the fabric of life. Kimsooja elaborates on this important aspect; ”The mobility of my body comes to represent the immobility of it, locating it in different geographies and socio-cultural contexts. Immobility can only be revealed by mobility, and vice versa. Constant interaction between the mobility of people on the street and the immobility of my body in-situ are activated during the course of the performance depending on the context of the society, the people, nature of the city and that of the streets…I pose ontological questions by juxtaposing my body and outer world in ‘relational condition’ to space/body and time/consciousness.” [4] This captures the essence of Kimsooja’s overall approach, which ultimately relates to the idea of the singularity of the individual as part of an endless multiplicity. Looking at the world through Kimsooja’s eyes, we find ourselves looking at the universe through the eye of a needle. As Kimsooja ‘sews into life’ she simultaneously unravels the thread that is the entire conceptual basis for her work. Imbedded in the visible and invisible seams of her work we see how the traces of migration, war and cultural conflict necessarily affect ones identity and perception of reality—conveyed by an artist who is fully aware of the power of connective aesthetics. Her vision of the totality of art and life is beautifully conveyed through the symbolic power of the needle to mend, heal and connect. She uses a needle to guide us towards awareness and understanding in an approach to art that is intricately spun around the literal and conceptual practice of sewing.

• Place is important in the work of Kimsooja. The Bottari Truck in Exile (1999) was a work on the road, a truck heaped with bundles of clothing and bedcovers wrapped in brilliant silk fabric, travelling from one place to the next. In video work from 1999 to 2001, she traveled to many places around the world to produce pieces such as A Needle Woman (1999-2001) and A Laundry Woman (2000). More recently, she has devoted much effort to site-specific work that transforms an existing place such as the Crystal Palace in Madrid (2005) or the Teatro la Fenice in Venice (2006) through the graceful calibrations of light and color. In many ways, Kimsooja’s art may be described as a searching meditation on the nature of place—asking a number of questions such as what a place is, how it is defined, how long it lasts, who makes it, what the relation of place is to body, and how places are experienced. A Homeless Woman (2001) and A Beggar Woman (2001), videos that document her emplacement within teeming urban crowds as an anonymous female figure dressed in gray, whose silent, immovable presence is literally out of place, disrupting the traffic of befuddled pedestrians, if only for a moment. Some respond by pausing to inspect her, others are bemused by the camera that witnesses their presence. Still others fail to notice her at all, for whom she is nothing but the blurred place through which they hurry on their way to work.

• The signals of critique, whether political or economic or geared to considerations of ethnicity or gender, are not hard to see. One could readily give Kimsooja’s art of place a reading that stresses an incisive reflection on the politics of identity, the social construction of gender and race, the economics of power and agency. Clearly, the crafting of place relies fundamentally on the coordinates of authority, social relations, and hierarchies keyed to ethnicity, race, and gender. And one need not look far in her discussions of her own work to find the artist’s corroboration of a political reading. She dedicated Bottari Truck in Exile, exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1999, to refugees of the current war in Kosovo. Exile is an apt theme in regard to place because it means the loss of one’s native setting or milieu, one’s homeland. Kimsooja brought the truck loaded with bottari (Korean for “bundle”) from Korea to Venice for the Biennale. The work was not simply the truck, but the process of getting it from one place to another. She traversed countless national and international boundaries to transport bundles of laundry, the baggage in which exiles haul the traces of their existence. One thinks of transnationalism and the global flows of labor; of forced migrations; of international traffic in contraband; or of worldwide circuitry of capital pulsing through networks of markets.

• The politics of power and powerlessness, of loss and theft are there, yet one senses that this framework does not exhaust what the work has to offer, where it wants to go. Kimsooja has spoken of the “dimension of pure humanity” as the special interest that drives her work[1]. She wants to ponder what she calls “the human condition and its reality” rather than indict political and economic systems. So she laments the refugees of the war in Kosovo rather than scrutinizing the conditions of the war’s existence. As an artist, human suffering concerns her in the first place, before the failure of social institutions and political will. An artist does not have to choose between the two, of course, but rather than critique and jeremiad, Kimsooja explores the intimate connection of art and moral sensibilities. She is a passionate observer of human beings. All of the work mentioned so far is evidence of an eye bent on the daily routines of human life, using them to register a wistful but wistfully beautiful sense of “the human condition and its reality.”

• One might say that the common and principal function of religion, morality, and traditional philosophy is to posit a human condition as a way of explaining suffering and proposing a solution to it, or at least a way of enduring it. Kimsooja does not want her art to engage viewers as a religion or morality or philosophy. But it is clear that she wants her work to elicit profound aesthetic reflection. Everything she works with is something that bears the traces of human touch—the things women gather and clean, launder and stretch for the wind to dry. The clothing and bedding that touch us everyday, like a second skin. The things we bundle and carry from place to place, the things we save when the house is burning, when the village is destroyed, when the economy collapses. The things that are left when we are gone, that lie scattered on the ground, as in Sewing into Walking (1994) or in Portrait (1991), where a massive cloak of discarded fragments of cloth rises like a monumental gravestone, a mortuary icon of lives whose flesh is remembered in a dense clutter of castoff artifacts. It is the way of all flesh, this scatter of clothing. Sewing into Walking traces a walk through time as a patchy fabric of strewn memories, if even that. This is an elegiac work, bound to evoke in many viewers a sense of what the artist calls “the human condition.”

• According to Buddhist teaching, everything, every feeling, is marked by impermanence, holding no place and passing away. Impermanence joins suffering and non-self as the three characteristics of existence, according to Buddhist thought. As one scholar has summarized the matter, “change, degeneration, and non-essentialism are fundamental features of everything.” [2] Nothing lasts, everything fails to satisfy, and there is no soul or self or substance that abides above it all. In short, there is no place to hold us that will not itself crumble into something else—except the dharma of release, or nirvana. Religions often describe a human condition because they want to diagnose the cause of suffering and to prescribe its solution—either through methods like the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism or the redemption that any number of salvific faiths offer their adherents.

• But Kimsooja does not craft an art tasked with human salvation—either by divine means or by human politics. Her work is not preachy or propagandistic or doctrinaire because what really drives her art is the power of things to provoke thought, to arrest the mind and to fix it on something elusive and mysterious, something we want to take for a truth. Kimsooja wants to cultivate a mindfulness of what human beings encounter by virtue of being human. She ponders what is human—loss, yearning, beauty, routine, work—and does so in the sensuous terms of art that define the places of everyday life. Art is a heightened sensory consciousness, a poignant awareness of the world that opens up in the place that watching, touching, hearing, and making afford. “I’ve never practiced meditation in my life,” she once said in an interview, “but I found every moment for me was a meditation in itself. I reached a similar Zen Buddhism completely through my own way of meditation on life and art and its practice.” [3]

• What does this make of art? The arts used to operate in the service of institutional religion, contributing to devotional life, decorating the altars of churches, shrines, pilgrimage sites, bodying forth the sacred in the daily exchanges between earthly mortals and heavenly powers in a sacred economy of pledge and favor, petition and reward. Popular imagery in everyday religious life still does that for believers today. But fine art has arisen over the last two centuries to occupy a different space in Western culture. For some people, art is a kind of therapy. It conducts a service of comfort, diversion, or uplifting pleasure. For others, however, the benefit must be described in terms of the meditative absorption to which Kimsooja alludes. Art is a way of refining or honing perception, for use as the means of introspection and as a social and cultural lens. In this approach, “aesthetic” does not mean beauty for the sake of beauty, but something more like sensuous cognition, a delicate tooling of the senses to scrutinize the world for the sake of a penetrating take on its weight and heat and chaos. And so we have Kimsooja’s artistic postulation of the human condition. This is neither religion nor politics; neither preaching nor moral reform. It is a limbic way of seeing, a projection of sensation into the larger world for the sake of feeling it vicariously in the skin of an artwork.

• What does that mean? Kimsooja’s art is about the cultural work of looking. You may behold A Needle Woman in at least two ways. First, as a video projected on a screen in a gallery over the course of an exhibition for a few weeks. In this instance the video acts as a documentary, recording human actions at another place and time. The scene is a street, far away, a place that is not here, where you and I are standing. We look upon the place with curiosity. An image of the video’s installation in a gallery shows how this works: a bench invites you to sit down and watch an image projected from above. The image appears, as if through a rectangular aperture that has opened up in the gallery wall. In the dimly lit space, you are urged to sit or stand quietly and gaze upon the scene. You devote yourself to the task, if you have time, because you hope to see something interesting, something you’ve not seen before. You wait for something to happen. It’s art, after all. It’s supposed to do something. But when very little happens, the second way of seeing the piece begins to take shape. You glance furtively about the gallery at those standing near you. You glance at your watch, you wonder how long this will go on. Ineluctably, your perception shifts from looking at a video image-window in the wall to looking at people in your vicinity looking at a video image-window in the wall. You become aware of the discomforts of your body. If you’ve ever meditated, the feeling will be familiar. The scene moves from there, on the other side of the wall, to here, in and around you, and you realize that you are part of the art. The piece takes your time, your body, your patience and invests it in a work that includes you. You might look for the door. You might want to get out of here. Yet you’re intrigued by the two sets of looking—on the screen and in this room, and you wonder what you feel.

• The boundaries of a work of art dissolved in the twentieth century. Art went from hanging on walls and perching on pedestals to happening in deserts and junkyards, on street corners and human bodies. With the dissolution of conventional boundaries came a redefinition of the place of art. So looking at A Needle Woman and A Laundry Woman, we ask: where is the artwork? Is it there, in the crowd’s response to or unawareness of the stolid presence around which they move? Or is it here, among us? Perhaps the two modalities are really one: we are yet another crowd in which the impassive worker woman stands. Perhaps our wandering eye is no different than the urban crowds in Tokyo, Cairo, Mexico City, London, or Delhi. Perhaps Kimsooja lures us into the gallery to sew the art world into the larger fabric of far-flung cities. To see her work is to be transported into a global work of art that shows us to ourselves. The boundaries demarcating the place of this art are disorienting, sublime. There is no getting out of it or away from it. Its center is everywhere, marked by the visual field that pivots on the gray figure of the artist standing steadfastly at the intersection of blinking gazes.

• The steady feature of the artist in these videos is the structure that configures our visual field. Even when she is engulfed by the crowd that weaves obliviously about her, she remains our point of reference. Kimsooja transcends the world out there by holding her back irresolutely toward us, here. The camera is never forgotten. The people there are placed on a stage stretching before us. They were filmed for the purpose of being screened elsewhere. Place as local site is not singular, but part of a larger set of places that only the art viewer is allowed to see. The folks in Delhi don’t know or ever see the people in Mexico City or Shanghai—or us. We do, thanks to Kimsooja’s back. If she only wanted to be a needle, to transform her body into an inanimate object, it would not matter if we saw her from the side or front or any other angle. But we never see her face. This device structures the work of art by showing its proper side, where it is to be viewed—in a gallery. The place of art is a critical moment, a step back in space or time to see anew. Kimsooja wants art to be the world tweaked to make us conscious of place—our place, the place of others, and the place of art, arising in the interstices of culture. Place matters to her because she loves the beguiling way that art seizes our attention and invites our devoted scrutiny.

• The appropriation of place for artistic purposes is something we see elsewhere in Kimsooja’s oeuvre. In the haunting beauty of An Album: Havana (2007), a ten-minute silent video created on site in Cuba. The camera runs for nearly three minutes down a pier overlooking the ocean and a cloudy horizon as lovers, tourists, and fishermen saunter along or sit on a stonewall. The video repeats for a second and third time, but each iteration increasingly blurs focus until in the final run the screen is a blank flicker that gradually transforms into bright light. In the second run we can still recognize the figures, but in the third sequence they evaporate in brownish haze. Deprived of sound and focus, the result is a lushly beautiful portrait of a place that steadily vanishes. What seems at first solid melts into the air, leaving viewers to wonder what their relation is to place that is no more. Memory of place may not be as sure as we’d like to think. With each replay, what we once stood before fades until finally it is gone. With nothing to see, it is not clear that the seer abides.

• In an altogether different piece, Mandala: Zone of Zero (2003), the sound of Tibetan, Gregorian, and Islamic chant animates a scintillating object, a large target-shaped series of concentric circles composed of mirrors, fabric, and colored plastic. Circular mandalas are familiar to North Americans because of the “wheel of time” rituals conducted by lamas who created elaborate sand forms, often in museums [4]. Kimsooja’s Mandala resembles the Tibetan Wheel of Existence, a teaching tool used by itinerant Buddhist teachers who unfurled their charts to explicate the doctrines of Buddhism. The chrome ornaments that mark the four directions on the mandala even recall the jaws of the Lord of Death who holds the wheel in Tibetan tangkas. And like the wheel of dharma set in motion by the Buddha, and the samsaric cycle of rebirth and the circular arrangement of teachings illustrating the Wheel of Existence, Kimsooja’s wheel turns, too.

• But the use of Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim chant in Mandala suggests that the artist has something broader in mind than the traditional Tibetan mandala. The object itself resembles a monumental roulette wheel more than a religious device—the star motifs recall the four-armed spindles at the center of roulette tables. Its glittering mirrors, sumptuous fabrics, gleaming chrome, and loud colors celebrate the ephemeral character of sensation, the flutter of fond feelings one associates with a jukebox full of favorite songs. All of this is very different from Buddhism’s diagnosis of the flitting mind’s need for the discipline of meditation to tame and control it. Yet although the art deco chrome ornamentation of the jukebox in Mandala reminds one of soda fountains and dance halls more than anything in a mediation hall, it does resemble popular Buddhist shrines and temples. One thinks of shiny golden statuettes of bodhisattvas, or of the long lines of brightly colored lanterns that appear each year at temples to celebrate Buddha’s birthday. Mandala spins and flashes like an incandescent turntable as the sound of chanting fills the room. Perhaps the mission of art, if it has one, is to reconnect introspection to the body and the senses. Whether you are in a disco or a Zen hall, you are in your body, and that is the means by which religion, mediation or art take place.

• Both Havana and Mandala invoke Buddhist tradition in different ways. Mandala uses a familiar motif in Tibetan tangkas; Havana recalls the three features of all phenomena: impermanence, dissatisfaction, and no-self. Yet neither piece can be said to emulate Buddhism by offering itself as a tool for Buddhist practice. Both are about the power and place of art in modern life. Where Havana blurs, and finally erases a sense of place, Mandala seems to transpose the viewer from the body of the Buddha enthroned in the mental architecture of an imagined shrine to the splendor of the human body awash in sensation. The point is not therapy or religion or meditation technique, but a refinement of perception, the aesthetic cultivation of imaginative, felt life. Kimsooja’s work is not art in the place of religion, but art as sensory reflection on the places where life happens in the way it does.

• Kimsooja gives herself to us. She does so through her art not simply because she is an artist, but because through art she can give to others. This exchange between artist and viewer has its rewards, offering access to the essence of human communication as well as essential connections to the larger reality of which we are a part. So following Kimsooja's path of communion among peoples and realms, empathy will be the focus of this essay.

• When we look at Kimsooja's art and see her standing there, we experience her aliveness and partake of her vitality along with our own. Her art makes us feel our aliveness. When we see Kimsooja there, completely still, we also see beyond her and beyond ourselves. Along with her presence in the wind, with the sun and the moon, we sense something more. She endeavors not so much to represent so we can see, but to be one with the world through her work so we can recognize our being too.

• In this way she participates in what cultures have always done. The names of those makers have not come down to us, so we praise past societies without individual recognition. But as she takes up her ancient charge we know her name or do we? To be her art, she consciously steps out of self, taking on a one-word name that "refuses gender identity, marital status, socio-political or cultural and geographical identity by not separating the family name and the first name.[1]"

• Making art as one's way of being, or more accurately way of becoming, is to see art as a path. It can also be a reminder of our shared path, and in that way art is like religion and philosophy. But unlike these other fields of endeavor, art alone can be an experience that words on a page can never quite be. More than explaining a connection between the mundane and spiritual realms, between what is perceived by the senses and what is sensed by the mind, in art these can unite and be one. Making art with this aim of ultimate meaning is an act of hubris (punishable by the ancient Greeks), and a dicey claim in our world today. So this is a precarious start for an essay, though for the work of Kimsooja, a necessary one. Her ambition calls for no less.

• Artists, like philosophers and theologians, are in the business of understanding the relation of the everyday to something greater: ideas, values, the ethereal. But it's not just a professional thing. It's what we do as humans and have done since the beginning of time. This is how we live and must. Each generation, each individual must find their meaning or live a life without it. Kimsooja's concerns are both with the here and now and beyond this place and time. Consciousness overtakes self-consciousness. How can we talk of this? "Spiritual" conjures notions too religious or new age-y for those in contemporary art, while the "unconscious" had a place earlier in the twentieth century, with the birth of psychology. The ambiguity of the ethereal, the other worldly, or unknown, means that it tends to be left out of discussion or to remain tacitly unspoken. "Universal" is a word banished by postmodernism. The claim to represent humanity is a totalizing concept that makes the use of this word suspicious; the complexity of social and cultural difference makes it taboo.

• An understanding of Eastern philosophy, religions, and culture are ways to think about for Kimsooja's art; they clearly enter into the very nature of who she is. Some have expertly written of this, and these references remain central sources for knowing for her art, but there is more, not just because she is a person of our times who lives and works across cultures, but also because there has been a rich cross-pollination between Eastern and Western thought for centuries now. So, while Kimsooja's work is grounded in Asian philosophy[2], I have chosen to write about her work through the lens of the Western pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, who was himself influenced by Taoist and Buddhist philosophy[3]. Turning to Dewey, we encounter the ideas of a humanist not embarrassed to venture into the wholeness of the enterprise that is life, because he, like Kimsooja, believed that a wide view is necessary and that art is the most meaningful way to achieve it.

• As Dewey saw it, life compartmentalized into high and low, and values categorized as profane or spiritual, material or ideal, betrays the nature of things. Likewise, he felt that dividing occupations or interests into practice and insight, imagination from doing, significant purpose from work, and emotion from thought and doing, is to mistake human nature. But when they come together, are one, as in Kimsooja's work, we can experience "deep realizations of intrinsic meanings," " the sense of reality that is in them and behind them," as they tell "a common and enlarged story," and Dewey believed, the ideal can be embodied and realized[4]. Then distinctions of mind and body, soul and matter fade away.

• To Dewey, this sense of continuity between the mundane world and something greater comes with experience, not just by living over time but by living life in a reflective, consciousness way[5]. For Kimsooja, her body is her medium and instrument conscious experience for others, not merely for expression or representation. And Dewey firmly believed, as Kimsooja demonstrates, that the senses, our own bodily capacity can be used directly to access the "spiritual, eternal and universal."[6] In Taoism, these realms are understood as one universal and ubiquitous vital energy. For Dewey we can know this through art.[7] The aliveness and vitality that art produces makes sense of life's experiences as it generates continuity between the earthly and eternal.

• Thus, the experience of art (and for Dewey, art is an experience rather than an entity or object ) puts us in touch with the spiritual, non-physical world. But just as not all experience possesses insight or continuity, not all art rises to the level where it achieve a union of the material and the ideal. Yet when looking at Kimsooja's work, we understand Dewey when he says: "The depth of the responses stirred by works of art shows their continuity with the operations of this enduring experience" because such "works and the responses they evoke are continuous with the very processes of living." Her works affect what this philosopher called: "The mystic aspect of acute esthetic surrender, that renders it so akin as an experience to what religionists term ecstatic communion." [9]

• Being consciously alive rises to the level of the aesthetic. It occurs, to Dewey, when we are fully and completely present in the experience of making and perceiving, but this does not only happen in the act of making art; it can happen in life.[10] For him, like Kimsooja, to live well, in an aesthetic or art way, is to be fully conscious, open, awake. As we are continually evolving in a state of becoming, we need to continually practice awareness. In Dewey's system of thought, in which each individual is responsible for themselves and for advancing society, practice involves putting one's values to work. His concept of the aware individual for his Pragmatist philosophy finds alignment with Buddhism's concept of buddha mind an awakened state of consciousness which respects both everyday action and the search to enlightenment as the same path. But whereas in Buddhism and Taoism this is achieved through meditation, Dewey advocated art. The work of art, in Dewey's view, as an object of practice can be a path to self-realization.

• This path includes understanding others, and in experiencing art, we can experience others. On one level, in viewing art we can share the feelings of others, what we commonly call empathy. On another level, in art we can be with others, something we might describe as an experience of humanity. Dewey knew that empathy was the basis for any social enterprise. Art, for Dewey, had this great capacity for empathetic experience because, he believed, experiencing art is an act of re-creation:

• Works of art are the means by which we enter, through imagination and the emotions they evoke, into other forms of relationship and participation than our own. We understand it in the degree in which we make it a part of our own attitudes, not just by collective information concerning the conditions under which it was produced. We accomplish this result when, to borrow a term from Bergson, we install ourselves in modes of apprehending nature that at first are strange to us. To some degree we become artists ourselves as we undertake this integration, and, by bringing it to pass, our own experience is reoriented. This insensible melting is far more efficacious than the change effected by reasoning, because it enters directly into attitude. [11]

• How might this apply in the art of Kimsooja? A Homeless Woman - Cairo (2001) becomes an object of interest, even of compassion, on the part of passersby who pause to consider her manifestation of a human condition that till then had been almost invisible. In A Beggar Woman the artist presented herself to people in the streets of Delhi (2000), Mexico City (2000), Cairo (2001), and Lagos (2001). A different manifestation of this work occurred with Beggar Woman: Times Square (2005). Misinterpreted in the press as a gesture flying in the face if this city's truly needy, we might contemplate the questions, How do we draw attention to need? Can we experience others throughout a city, beyond just one city, holding in our hearts their hunger? Is acknowledgment of them acceptance without change? Who is in need? Who is present? Who offers what to whom?

• Have you ever received a comment from a homeless person that stayed with you even though you gave nothing, while a thank you in return for money given on another occasion was not a memorable moment? Here the hands of Kimsooja's sitters are in a gesture simultaneously receiving and offering, being needy and charitable, troubled and wise. A practice in many religious traditions including Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Christianity, in which beneficence is manifested through both giving and receiving this act of engagement contains all things. [12]

• Other empathetic works, beginning in 1995 with Sewing into Walking - Dedicated to the Victims of Gwangju, have taken the form of memorials. Clothes stood in for persons, spread out on a mountainside where tragedy had struck. It was a commemoration of as many at 2000 killed there as they rose up against the dictatorship of then-president Chun Doo-hwan. And it was a poultice for the earth. This incident, called 518 to signify its start date of May 18, found a parallel in 9/11 when later Kimsooja was moved to a enact a loving gesture of remembrance. In Epitaph (2002) she laid a single bedspread at Greenlawn cemetery in view of New York's skyline. Clothes, used as in Gwangju, were laid out on the floor of Hitler's former office in Poznan, Poland, to form Mandala: Chant for Auschwitz (2010), while cloth in all its colors and forms flow through four screens of Mumbai: A Laundry Field (2007-08), standing "for human presences and the questions that concern us all," [13] and creating a wider circle of life, not just of this place but many. On this occasion, as in other works, she also draws upon the ancient form of the mandala as a symbol of the universe and a vehicle of practice for focusing attention and bringing one in touch with a realm beyond the profane.

• Carpets of clothes led to newly fashioned carpets with Planted Names (2002). Four woven works memorialize those who made the Middle Passage, packed in rows aboard ships, and then planted in rows the vast carpet of the former rice fields of the plantation site for which they were made [14]. In part inspired by the artist's experience the year before in Nigeria, this work was preceded by Bottari: Alfa Beach (2001) in which the sea sits atop the sky. This inversion is an empathetic response, she said, to "the saddest line I've ever seen in my life, thinking of the destiny of the slaves and their deprived freedom. Thus the flipped horizon was, for me, a disturbed horizon, a disoriented sense of gravity and of the slaves' psychological return I perceived in the curls of the waves reaching the same shore from which they had left." [15]

• Kimsooja embraces the many associations of water: purification and cleansing, the depth of the womb and the vastness of the universe, its lunar cycles or the mind, and fluidity, as Taoism tells us, is the flow of energies and the inevitability of impermanence. In A Lighthouse Woman (2002), a companion to Planted Names, she created a witness to the waters' histories of pain through an oversized needle-like object surrounded by water. Its repeating, hour-long sequence of nine hues projected onto the lighthouse caused it to change as if breathing, saturating it and spilling into a pool the color. Viewers gave time to see this work, participated in being witnesses to time. And in experiencing A Lighthouse Woman they could experience empathy, not as an idea but, as Dewey said, through their individual senses they could actually experience "the spiritual, eternal and universal." Visited communally, there was communion.

• The empathy of each of these works was made real through the use of historical and geographic reference and the artist's astute choice of tangible, material form, yet became the embodiment of others. In perceiving these works, as Dewey knew, we come to understand the wider story of humanity over time and to appreciate others' struggles. This happens across cultures, and even if we think we are more critical and aware of cultural differences than Dewey's generation, there's some truth as he says: "when the art of another culture enters into attitudes that determine our experience genuine continuity is effected. Our own experience does not thereby lose its individuality but it takes unto itself and weds elements that expand its significance"; then experience is one of "complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events," transforming into "participation and communication." [16]

• In Kimsooja's work empathy of specific moments and situations gives way to a greater sense of oneness in humanity. This is the experience we have of Kimsooja's magnum opus, A Needle Woman. Begun in 1999, it is the embodiment of the fluidity of ourselves and our self into others, of time flowing into time, of place flowing into place, of oneness. She is the needle and yet the eye of the needle. She is the key that opens our vision, yet at the same moment the keyhole through which we pass. She shifts seamlessly, fluidly, between being solid and there, to empty, a shadow. Thus, in Needle Woman, we have two sides, too spectator and participant, as we looking at and moving into the scene, seeing others flowing along, being in the flow. Here our full participation is the transformation through the experience of art.

• It has often been remarked that here the artist remains anonymous by not revealing her face. But it is more: she and all the persons in the frame are part of a larger, unframed whole: everything, everywhere. We understand this when this artist says, "I have an ambition as an artist: it is to consume myself to the limit where I will be extinguished. From that moment, I won't need to be an artist anymore, but just a self-sufficient being, or a nothingness that is free from desire." [17] Thus, Kimsooja aspires to a level beyond that of the experience of others and their story, and even beyond humanity as she seeks to approach the experience of a greater realm. To do this, art is a path not a goal, and a way to achieve full self-realization.

• Taoism says the human mind before creation is pure emptiness, and that within this emptiness or void resides all potential. With awareness our mind can return to this state of emptiness, once again becoming part of it, connecting us to the universe and, during moments of insight, producing a sense of oneness with all things. This mental state is not a matter of representing reality; it is a state of being. This all-inclusive reality connects with our own mundane self because it is already ours or, better, it is already us. When Kimsooja speaks of "being consumed to the limit," she participates in that wholeness and is one with it. Art that evokes this multi-dimensional connection possesses an empathetic essentialism that goes beyond coming in touch with the emotions of others to achieve true identification, an understanding of being.

• This level of empathy has been called by Gonzalo Obelleiro "imaginative empathy." It "is concerned with the essence of emotion, not the specifics of its manifestations," he writes, finding Dewey's philosophy of experience useful to ground a pedagogy imaginative empathy [18]. It is true that in addition to art's practical social roles of producing empathy, hence, creating an empathetic state of awareness, Dewey also felt that imagination through art played a social role [19]. But imagination in art and in common parlance has a sense of flights of fancy rather than of truth of experience, so here I prefer to recast this empathy found in the essence of emotion, as "essential empathy."

• In A Needle Woman—Kitakysuhu (1999) the artist lies on an exposed rock of a mountain. Her stillness between earth and sky allows us to perceive the connected transitoriness of all nature, human as well as earthly and heavenly. Moving beyond self, she says: "Over time, I find that my body, with its duration of stillness—breathing in the rhythm of nature—becomes itself a part of nature as matter, neutral, a transcendent state. To me it is like offering and serving my body to nature. [20]" Likewise in Laundry woman—Yamuna River, India (2000), we experience, as she did, a similar oneness. Standing downriver from a cremation site, she faces the ephemeral joining the eternal. She des not represents or expresses this moment of passage but achieves it in a complete enlightened state of awakeness. And when this was achieved, she said, she "finally realized that it is the river that is changing all the time in front of this still body, but it is my body that will be changed and vanish very soon, while the river will remain there, moving slowly, as it is now. [21]" Our life is fluid, always changing, as we float in the river of the universe. As with A Needle Woman, she is in the picture yet evaporates from it, opening up the space for us to enter. As viewers, she gives us a glimpse of an awakened state: initially what it looks like, then with time, if we can achieve a deeper state of consciousness and presence, the chance to fuse and become one with her, replacing the artist, participating ourselves. So her art, like potent, sacred objects of cultures throughout time immemorial are not representations but means to this state of essential empathy, not the picture of it.

• One of the primary aims of perceptual awareness for Dewey is for us to become conscious of the consequences of our actions, on other peoples and humankind, and for the planet. Today we think "planetary" in regard to ecological and environmental stewardship, but Dewey was also thinking in less tangible ways. With an understanding our individual effect on the greater whole, Dewey modeled a responsive and elastic web of consciousness in co-existent, recalling the Buddhist concept of interconnectedness as envisioned as Indra's Net: all things are a part; each reflects the whole; each affects and is affected by every other part.. With a belief that art was useful in guiding personal development toward social good, Dewey seized upon art's exceptional ability to create feelings of empathy and, thus, deeper understanding of the human condition and existential condition. For this he depended on art, for he knew it was essential to imagine a better future.

• In other works, such as A Wind Woman (2003), Kimsooja becomes nature. In Earth—Water—Fire—Air (2010) she works at the site of a nuclear plant in Korea. For A Mirror Woman: The Sun & the Moon (2008), filmed on a beach in Goa, India, she created the moment of eclipse, when the sun and moon become one. The artist, it could be said, is gone in these works, but rather she is fully present with everything. Doris von Drathen has so aptly written of this work when she says the space the artist occupies is "the dividing wall of the mirror that generates consciousness," from which "she can view the impossible, open her range of vision into the cosmos, intensify her own sense of consciousness towards transcendence. At this moment of absolute presence, an ethical dimension reveals itself," whish is at once "the relinquishment of an identity that is defined by belonging" and "an awareness that concentrates utterly and absolutely on the Self." And here, too, we participate as: "The viewer merges into the incessant breathing of the sea, as it gives forth its waves, allowing them to rise and subside in eternal circuit...the viewer becomes susceptible to the circuit of the celestial bodies in the selfsame endlessness of their return [22]. Our full existence demands this connection to something larger.

• Artists can be insightful and make insightful art. If we are perceptive, art can give glimpses of insight. But rarely is art insight. Yet this happens when Kimsooja embodies oneness or, Dewey's terms, continuity, giving herself to us and, when we experience it as we give ourselves to her art and fully participate in it. Participation. It's a word Dewey chose [23], but which has taken on a new meaning in art today as we have lost the capability to participate with art objects, and talk about engaging viewers in modes of participation such as collaborative authorship or other forms of making. Spectatorship connotes detachment, looking at the surface of things or actions. In American and European contemporary life the spectacle society is one of superficial and mediated relationships [24]. The spectator does not feel empathy, but the participant does. And only as a participant can we partake on yet another level of the essential empathy that Kimsooja experiences and which become her art.

• To be a participant in Kimsooja's art does not require sitting in Times Square or being with the artist on a beach in India. It can happen in front of a video in a gallery. To an exceptional degree her art revives the experience of art Dewey knew—where being with art makes all the difference. If we think about the viewer as involved in empathetic relation to the artist's experience, to others' experiences, and to the essence of empathy, then as participants we are caring, hence engaged. Caring, the engaged audience functions like the artist, invested in the moment [25]. This parallel of artist-to-audience is so fundamental that as we experience art we "become artists ourselves." [26] Kimsooja gives us the possibility to do this with her art. If we fully participate, the experience is ours.

• "Hospitality is certainly, necessarily, a right, a duty, an obligation, the greeting of the foreign other as a friend but on the condition that the host, the Wirt, the one who receives, lodges or gives asylum remains the patron, the master of the household, on the condition that he maintains his own authority in his own home, that he looks after himself and sees to and considers all that concerns him and thereby affirms the law of hospitality as the law of the household, oikonomia, the law of his household, the law of a place…." —Jacques Derrida, "Hostipitality" [1]

• The six videos projected simultaneously that comprise the Korean artist Kimsooja's A Needle Woman (2005) present the artist wearing precisely the same clothes, standing precisely the same way, and, it would seem, at the same time of day, the sun shining down. She is absolutely still amid passing crowds of inhabitants in Patan, Nepal; Havana, Cuba; N'Djamena, Chad; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Sana'a, Yemen; and Jerusalem, Israel. The crowds react differently to this odd figure, clearly a foreigner. They are presented in slow motion, with no sound, which only emphasizes the sense of movement, instant reaction, passage.

• A Needle Woman has been written about many times, and Kimsooja is often described in these writings as a nomadic figure in this work, traveling across the world to come to rest in a crowded thoroughfare and then move on to the next. The needle referred to in the title is Kimsooja theorizing herself as a needle that passes through the fabric of a place and its people; and there is that other sense of a needle, that it sews together, is an instrument of suture, of healing, which could not be more appropriate because the locations that are visited in the work are all places of violence, disrepair or unresolved conflict. But as the light falls on her vertical figure, I would suggest another instrument that she can be interpreted to represent, and that is the gnomon.

• A gnomon is the standing element of a sundial that casts the shadow and indicates the hour. It is an index of the sun's passage over the surface of the earth, but not an index of the sun for itself, so to speak, but the sun as a sign of time, and time not for itself but as the sign of what happens ultimately to each of us. Time is the marker of our transition through aging, the marker of our passage, we at the center; and the gnomon, therefore, indicates not only surfaces but human interiority, not only an exterior of sunlight and shadow but time in us, of us, and for us. (The old Greek word gnomon means "indicator," "the one who discerns," or "that which reveals.") This is to say that light and shadow begin on the surface of things, and we inscribe them in a symbolic regime; they become elements in the narrative of our rise in time and our fading, of our moral troubles, our ethical thresholds and flaws. These lights and shadows work their ways into us, embed themselves, and are indicated by the marks our actions leave.

• Kimsooja, who plants herself in the middle of place, which is the activation of space as a locus of meaning, is this gnomon figure, this gnomon of place, against whom the physical light and its symbolic presence falls—an indexical instrument recording human passage and transition. This is on the level of the anthropocentric, of the human as the root of all occasion, all meaningfulness. [2] But the index here does not simply regard the internalization of knowledge, an epistemological dominion of its own self-reflexive primacy. No, Kimsooja, whose face is always unseen in this work, who stands like statuary, a flesh monument to the human, offers us the face of everyone else. These faces are the signifying engines of each tableau. They reflect light passing, of movement that is notated in time, of shadows, of a narrative unspooling, telling the story of a transitory exchange, of the value of the transitory in its opposite: that which leaves a mark. Where is this exchange? It is transacted within that "law of a place" Derrida suggests, which is a place of exchange, with its oikonomia, its discipline of the household's inventory. It is an economy of relations that, like hospitality, assumes an exchange, and it happens here, in A Needle Woman, among a triad of nodes:

1 ) There are the individual faces in the crowd.
2 ) There is Kimsooja, the one who discerns.
3 ) There are the viewers, us, the ones toward whom these faces move.

• The author Susan Stewart has written that a face is a "‘deep' text, a text whose meaning is complicated by change and by a constant series of alterations between a reader and an author," [3] and this is what we find here. These texts are read by Kimsooja, as they read hers. They write each other and read each other, and these trajectories of reciprocity extend to us, the third node of the triad. Kimsooja is the indicator of meaning, that which reveals, which she reads on the faces of these foreigners, who are not foreigners in this place where she is the foreigner, but to her and to us are themselves foreigners in foreign lands, who she instigates to project meaning, and we receive it. Our position, of course, is the same as the artist's. Our expressions, our knowledges, our dispositions are not seen, since we too face forward, away from others. If she is the index of these texts, then we who receive the meanings of these faces are the archive. In us lie the accumulation of their expressions and perceived meanings. They leave notations, marks.

• In each of these places where Kimsooja has come, she writes herself into another book, another register: the book of guests. As such she has the right to be treated decently, without aggression, by the people of any foreign land, as Immanuel Kant says. He says it plainly in his tract from 1795, "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch," of which the third section is entitled, "The Law of World Citizenship Shall Be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality." He writes that hospitality is "not a question of philanthropy but of right. Hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives on the soil of another." Her position is one of cosmopolitan demand. International law supports this principle of cosmopolitanism: If I intend to do you no harm, I will not be the subject of hostility when I cross into your territory. That is the right of cosmopolitanism, of hospitality.

• But of course note that hostility has the word "host" within it, so it is buried within the genealogy of human praxis that to be host may also mean to be an aggressor. So it is that this turning of tables, this inversion of meaning, is embedded within the figure of Kimsooja herself. She would seem to be the guest here in Jerusalem, Patan, Havana, and so forth, an open receptor of her hosts' reactions to her presence. But there is always this possibility of inversion in these terms of host and guest. In her presencing, she is the aggressor, the one who makes a demand, the one who claims by her indexical stance an ownership of place, this space of meaning-making, a directive presence, an emanation of control projected onto her guests, who instantaneously and therefore unwittingly enter into her symbolic territory and offer up to her, as guests do, something of themselves that she requires for their entrance. As the gnomon, she records these passages, her monitoring of time's essence as the passage of the body, its consciousness, and its disposition of knowledge and meaning. This is what we see. This is what then enters into us and is stored in our memories.

• There is another machine at work in A Needle Woman because what I have been describing are machines, mechanisms that produce end-products through their labors—in this case, writing machines and reading machines, machines that record each place's citizens caught in the encounter of revealing their reaction to foreignness and leaving their text for the artist, for us. The task the artist has given herself is to be the apparatus of this textuality, to perform it in each of these spaces where, as Henri Lefebvre states, space "is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand, and all other bodies on the other." [4] It is in this spatial situation that Kimsooja's body performs the act of a particular inscription: this revealing of difference. For as I've said, each of these places she has chosen to stand in is a conflict zone, and violence can be defined as a foreignness alien to a first state of being in its tolerance of difference that is Edenic peace. These are then places alien to themselves, and Kimsooja is an alien in these lands of alienation, an index of Otherness in which everyone is an Other as long as there is no resolution of difference or in which difference has not been an accepted resolution in itself. The artist has loaded her meaning-machine with the data of geopolitics and history. And with that data stored, she adds the element of the foreign irritant (herself), the virus, the possibility of another data set with which this first data set must interact.

• If Kimsooja's first machine is the performance-body in the operative process of revealing the text of foreignness, this other machine is a byproduct of her body's performance: a different kind of machine, a self-referential machine, an aesthetic machine—the machine of Modernism, built in the nineteenth century, dominant in the twentieth, and still working today. Its operating principle is the self-conscious unveiling of an artwork's mechanism, as Mallarmé unveiled the workings of the poem through a poetry about the self-consciousness of making a poem; as the Cubists made representational illusion on a painted surface a problem of painting to be observed, broken down, and rebuilt, etc. This machine is made manifest in the form that it takes before us here: A Needle Woman as video, as a time-based transition of images that hosts time while denying time the ultimacy of its ongoing forward movement. Her video's slow motion distends time and then keeps stopping, refusing it continuity because the video implies that time goes on, then cuts it off over and over in a loop of suspension. The continuity of time in A Needle Woman lasts for precisely ten minutes and thirty seconds. Then it begins again. Nor is it one time that starts and stops; its six places present six times starting and stopping simultaneously.

• It does not contradict my argument to say, "Well, that's true of any film, video, TV show, streaming webcast, radio program, even a theater play." That may be so, but nonetheless it is here the matter of specific artistic choice that is crucial. In the first performance video of A Needle Woman, executed in 1999, Kimsooja did not use slow motion; it was presented in "real" time. But here she purposefully does so, availing herself of the medium's technical self-consciousness of time, revealing the medium's unwillingness to surrender to the time-ness of time, to its continuity, and instead overwhelms it, denies it, commands it, erupts it. (Modernism counts among its hallmarks discontinuity and eruption.) In this sense, her video is a parasite of time, a foreign guest who overtakes its host, just as Derrida says that the host can become the hostage. [5]

• This self-referential aesthetic machine is a ghostly presence, for ghost and guest are also words that share the same root in their signifying of the one who visits. This machine of representation hovers, being hosted by time and yet taking time hostage, revealing this internal conflict that remains unresolved—an echo, a shadow laid down over the video's first presence as the record of bodies as meaning-machines whose subject, too, is the encounter of conflict that remains unresolved, the question of the foreigner. Subject and mechanism share the double-position of the aporia, of an internal confrontation of contradictory forces who are both hosts and guests, just as Kimsooja's figure in A Needle Woman stands in this double-position, this double-imposition of silent entreaty and power's requisition of others for one's own purpose. Her figure, then, belongs to the discourse of hospitality. She is the steward of the aporia, the body of supplicant and sovereign, of visitor and imposing owner of place, a needle piercing time, not healing it, but holding it in suspension. Yet we, who are the third node in this transaction, are not outside of time, not held in place. The gnomon of foreignness falls across us and enters us. Time continues in us as foreignness does, with its demands on hosts and guests, its questions of domination, its juridications, its texts, its burdens and pleasures that enter us again, now held by us: an inquiry, an offering, a mirror, a virus of troubled rights.

• A fundamental presence in much of Kimsooja's work is that of the body. Over decades of production, beginning with the sewn works of the eighties, in which the body was merely implied through the presence of cloth, followed by the bottari works of the nineties that served as metaphors for intimate coverings of the body, to her canonical video works recording the artist's bold physical presence in the world and some of her most recent works implicating the human presence of others, the body has been one of the underpinnings of an artistic practice that addresses large issues of our time—primarily, how we relate as human beings, and the physical/spiritual/social nature of such relations. After all, it is through the body that we perceive and act in the world, and it is also through our bodies, as viewers of Kimsooja's work, that we come to gain a perspective on her ideas. The following dialogue with the artist focuses on four points of entry into to the performative aspects of her work: body, place, time and participation.

• Daina Augaitis
  One of your earliest works, Structure – A Study on Body (1981), is a set of prints that explores the idea of a universal body—but in this case you were already, as a young artist in 1981, inserting the specificities of your own subjective body into your work, as if to counter a universal stereotype. Can you describe the impetus for making this work?

• Kimsooja
  After graduating from college in 1980, I continued investigating questions of tableau as a place in which painters spend their lives trying to find their own mirror. I especially focused on its woven horizontal and vertical system—and with this, the structure of the world and the universe at large. I valued this cruciform structure as a means for understanding the inner structure of aesthetics and human psychology, and it also gave me a perspective from which to approach natural phenomena. This also led to my master's thesis: "A Study on the Universality and Hereditariness of the Plastic Sign: A Focus on the Cruciform Sign" (1984). It was an investigation of the transcendent examples of ancient archetypes through to modern and contemporary painting and sculpture in relation to anthropological and psychological aspects. For example, my enthusiasm for Korean culture at that time extended to the Korean alphabets that were constructed by three symbolic Taoist elements: earth (horizontal line), sky (vertical line) and the human being (dot), a system invented by King Sejong of the Joseon dynasty in the fifteenth century that has an intrinsic horizontality and verticality. I've been focusing totally on this cruciform structure in Korean architecture, furniture, objects and alphabets—even in traditional garments and human psychology—as a basis for understanding the world. During my first trip to Japan in the late 1970s, I came to recognize the uniqueness of Korean visual culture in terms of its own sensibility of colour, especially in relation to Japanese, Chinese and other Asian cultures, which I had previously thought had greater similarities. This interest then expanded to include the body as a tool for the formal examination of horizontal and vertical structures, in a way that is similar to how it is incorporated in our alphabet. My intention in these performative prints was to explore my body within a circular framework as a geometric axis, using images of my arms, hands and legs stretched and folded in various poses to create spatial dimensions that were highlighted with different colour tones. Leonardo da Vinci created a certain universal stereotype in his Vitruvian Man, but for me it was less about proportion than about the dimensionality of the space extended into the world through the cross-like structures of my own body. That was the starting point for this project, which ended up as a series of serigraph prints. It was only a few years later that I escaped from Christianity/Catholicism, and while I won't disagree that I have had a psychological association with cruciform shapes in the artistic domain, that was not the motivation behind exploring the cross shape in my sewn work.

• Daina Augaitis
  You were conscious of the specificities of your culture and exploring those, but what about the specificity of gender? Were you consciously making work as a female? What was the situation for women in Seoul in the eighties?

• Kimsooja
  When I was young I understood the position of women in our society to a limited degree, but I became much more aware of it after I married in 1983, when the different roles and positions of women in the family and in society became clearer to me and I began to explore identity issues. However, I looked at my own culture through completely different eyes when I returned to Seoul at the end of 1993 from New York (after finishing a one-year residency at PS1), a place where many different roles, ethnicities, cultures and value systems were in action.

• At times I am conscious that I am a female when it comes to domestic daily-life relationships, and in a political sense, but not as much in art-making, even though I realize I implicate the traditional female domain by using tools like the needle and activities like sewing. However, I believe these elements have evolved conceptually beyond contexts of femininity. It's not that I wish to emphasize my gender, but I am simply not a man, and I can't make my titles A Needle Man or A Mirror Man or A Beggar Man. I started a "sewing" practice in the early eighties neither as a female artist nor as a female specifically interested in sewing nor as someone who was particularly good at sewing. Rather, I was questioning the surface of the tableau and measuring its bodily and psychological depth, binding myself to it (the other) and taking it as a mirror with which to reflect myself, which was also a healing process for me and for others. I discovered experimental artistic value in women's domestic labour—especially in Korea, where female and male labour were clearly separated until the late nineties. Even now, tasks such as cleaning the house, doing laundry, cooking, decorating the home, shopping and educating children are divided along gender lines, although the younger generation has become more open to sharing domestic responsibilities and there are more female professionals in Korean society in recent years. In the late nineties I was compelled to refer to the context of women's labour in performative painting, sculpture and installation. And the discovery of the bottari (Korean word for "bundle") as a form of tableau—a sculpture and a "ready-used" object—made me continue to extend this notion of women's "labour" in contemporary art practice. I was increasingly engaged with my symbolic works made from bedcover fabrics, which had a parallel meaning in my personal life after I got married. It is not unrelated to the cultural and ethical position or expectations that Korean women have in our society. Nevertheless, I never wished my practice to demonstrate a feminist or an activist position, although I certainly accept my own femininity and the strong feminine aspect of my work. More importantly, I believe in a basis of humanity, and while feminism stands alongside humanism, I am less interested in gender-oriented power struggles. In hindsight, I still think my engagement with methodologies based on female domestic labour was more about avant-garde action in relation to contemporary painting and the concept of tableau.
  The short period I spent in New York was instrumental, because that's when I discovered a new meaning in the used traditional Korean bedcovers of newly married couples as a ready-made/ready-used aesthetic formation. By wrapping fragments of used traditional clothing in these colourful bedcovers, the bottari constituted a wrapped two-dimensional "tableau" that had been transformed into a three-dimensional sculpture simply by tying one knot and encasing all the contents, as if hugging them all inwardly or being pregnant. It is an action of wrapping bodies and memories. While I was in New York, these bottari objects were a formalistic and aesthetic statement, but when I returned to Korea, I saw our society and women's roles in it from a more critical perspective, and the bottari was no longer just an aesthetic object. Rather, it became tied to notions of the body, to my own conditions and to those of women in general in Korean society, and also to human destiny in a broader sense. After that, I no longer used fragments of coloured fabrics inside of the bottari as a way of creating a type of "pigment." Instead, I began to wrap used clothing in its entirety in order to emphasize elements of reality.

• Daina Augaitis
  When you're using fabric and clothing as the material for many of your works, it implies an absent body. As you think back on these early works, what body were you referring to? Is it your body? Is it a metaphorical body of society?

• Kimsooja
  Looking back at my earlier practice, it seems interesting that I've been so focused on associating fabric and clothing with the skin and the body; even now I realize how much I've been conscious of its presence and connotation. The question began with the conditions of my own body, but I must say it was translated and transformed into somebody else's and then, ultimately, into an anonymous body. I try to use my body more objectively than subjectively and don't wish to make it about personal revelation.

• Daina Augaitis
  Thinking about when you began to make bottari in New York, could you further describe the implication of the memory of their previous owners?

• Kimsooja
  I had been making large sewn pieces since 1983, stitching square- or rectangleshaped parts of used clothes together into a flexible and not pre-determined "canvas." A few of them were cross-shaped—which of course can be a reference to a body or have a religious connotation—while others were triangular or irregularly shaped, based on verticality and horizontality. I started with the old clothes of my grandmother and then I used anonymous people's clothing. At that time, I worked mostly with traditional clothing not only because I was fascinated with the nature of the fabric, but also because the practices of Korean daily life were very much ruled by tradition—that is to say, by Confucianism, which created a strong hierarchy in domestic life and in our society. However, this was also one of the reasons that non-verbalized suppression and contradictions were present in our society. I was never actively engaged with feminism or with any particular groups or isms in my private life or in my art. It was my goal to maintain an independent stance while pursuing a sense of totality in my practice. What happened was that these social concerns merged with my existential and aesthetic problems.

• After 1990, I moved away from the square shapes and made irregularly assembled forms with the same materials on a larger scale, which brought a more open dimension to my work. My last sewn piece made at PS1, Towards the Flower (1992), is a large, sewn assemblage wall piece consisting of a long pole wrapped with reused bedcovers and scraps of clothing leaning against the tableau together with my first wrapped bottari as another component. The piece combines three elements: the wall tableau as a painting; the pole leaning onto the painting, which replaces my (or the audience's) hand and gaze and is an extended body; and the first bottari I had made as a sculpture that enfolds and wraps up all the sewn pieces I had made in the past. In the end, the bottari seemed to encapsulate everything inside of it and became a complex symbol. I didn't make any more sewn pieces after that.

• Daina Augaitis
  How did you make the transition from the bottari works to the video works in which you begin to use your own body as subject matter?

• Kimsooja
  My first video was actually intended as a documentary film of my methodical working process with the bedcovers at a chosen site in Oksanseowon Valley in Kyungju. There I laid the bedcovers out on the ground like a field of laundry and then slowly collected them in my arms and wrapped them into bottari. The film shows every single step and interaction with these flexible fabrics (or "canvases"). At the end, I wrapped everything into two bottari and carried them away. When I was reviewing the footage, I immediately noticed that my body walking on the fabric signified a symbolic needle and I furthermore discovered that the camera's lens and the video's frame served as another form of immaterial framing within the screen. The video thus became a wrapping of the wrapping. The juxtaposition of such opposites—the physicality of the bottari, which evokes a body, together with the video frame as another immaterial way of wrapping—has been a component of my work ever since.

• Daina Augaitis
  As you began to move into this field of performance centred on your own living body as an essential aspect of the work were you thinking at all about some of the experiments of Valie Export, Marina Abramović or Yoko Ono? Were you interested in the history of performance art as you began to use your own body?

• Kimsooja
  I had only seen a few historical performance images, but I was not interested at all in the staged performances or violent actions of Western performers. Instead I wished to interact directly with nature or in the realm in which real life occurs—not to show something to the audience, but rather to offer an experience for both the audience and myself… In 1979, while I was still at art school, there was an "event" as part of the Daegu Contemporary Art Festival that I was invited to be a part of. It was an interactive "Two-Person Event" organized by Kim Yong-Min for which we ravelled from Seoul to the Gangjeong riverside in Daegu. We wore identical orange workers' vests and departed from the Seoul train station for Daegu, my home town. We took notes on the journey (mainly done by Kim Yong-Min) and each one of us collected preferred objects along the river that were installed in two small adjacent spaces with primitive walls constructed from gathered branches. I collected small objects, such as stones, small piles of sand, little tree branches, flowers, a tiny soju (Korean sake) glass, fresh garlic cloves, etc. I placed the garlic and the soju glass on top of a small installation of branches and leaves atop a tiny sand dune, as if it were a small shrine offering in a shamanistic ceremony. Each of us hung our clothes on the wall and left our travel notes that recorded the entire journey from the train station in Seoul to the Gangjeong riverside and the exhibition space in Daegu. This journey together was unplanned, and was guided completely by each of our individual desires. I realized then that this raw energy of daily life would become the essence of my performances. I wanted to establish a totally different way of doing performances by inverting the notion of an artist as a predominant actor through "non-doing" and "nonmaking" in order to reveal a critical point that is without heroism and without violent action or aggression. I was quite vulnerable and disturbed by the violent performance actions of some performance artists in relation to their own bodies or those of others. I've always questioned a violent exploitation of the body, as it is something I am completely against, even if it is intended to demonstrate the infliction of violence upon the body. I have always believed that there is a way to demonstrate critical ideas without being aggressive.

Place

• Daina Augaitis
  Your earliest performance-based works occurred when you began to travel with the bottari works in the mid nineties. Was this to explore different places as a way of locating specific contexts and histories that would emerge out of them?

• Kimsooja
  I was inspired by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru's exhibition Cities on the Move, a project in which I participated. When I was young, my family was always moving from one city or village to another due to my father's job. I often enjoyed playing with my school friends in my teenage years by writing down all the names of the cities and villages in which I had lived, connecting them to one another with lines like long sewn stitches in between the names of the towns. The title of Cities on the Move reminded me of our family's nomadic life and inspired me to do the Cities on the Move – 2727 Kilometers Bottari Truck (1997) performance, revisiting all of the villages and cities of my youth in an eleven-day trip across Korea.

• Daina Augaitis
  By now you have worked in a vast number of cities throughout Asia and around the world. What are your thoughts about the idea of place now? Are you using those locations as a way to root your experience in them? How do you choose where you'll be going?

• Kimsooja
  When I chose Tokyo as the location for the first performance of A Needle Woman (1999), I only had the idea that I would do a performance piece in the city followed by one in nature, without any more specific plans. Clearly, I didn't want to be an actor on stage, and it was a new challenge for me to pursue this experience as an anonymous performer. This work was intended as the first performance piece that I would record and show to the public, working together with the CCA Kitakyushu. I follow my instinct in terms of the energy that I feel from a place—it is an energy that has a lot to do with either people or nature. I often choose the place intuitively, otherwise I am not inspired and can't perform.
  In order to experience my body defined by different realities, the enlightening experience in Shibuya of standing solitarily in the middle of humanity was followed by the opposite axis of standing with a performance of lying horizontally in solitude in nature.

• Daina Augaitis
  When you work in different locations, does your work change? And how do you intersect with the social, cultural, political and economic dimensions of each place?

• Kimsooja
  I had an incredible experience performing in Tokyo. The performance started the moment in which I became aware of my body in an extreme state of conflict in the middle of a big crowd. I couldn't walk anymore and just had to stop right there and be still in order to tame the inner scream building in my body from the energy of all the people around me. As it became more and more extreme it felt as if I were getting wrapped up inside my own body like a bundle—an absolute sense of self-awareness. That's how the performances of A Needle Woman (1999–2001, 2005, 2009) began. While I was standing still and remaining centred, I experienced an incredible transition in my mind from vulnerability to a focused, meditative and enlightened state of mind. This is when my mind and eyes entered the reality of a large universe, seeing the white light beyond the horizon of the waves of people coming and going. This powerful experience of enlightenment enabled me to meet the people of the world's most crowded cities. For the first series of A Needle Woman performances, I chose the most populated locations in the world in order to meet oceans of people—Shanghai, Delhi, Cairo, New York, Mexico City, London and Lagos, all metropolises on different continents.

• Daina Augaitis
  When you arrived in these cities did you think in advance about what the politics of each place were?

• Kimsooja
  Before this work, I hadn't witnessed the conflicts, violence or poverty that exist around the world. But after visiting Delhi, Lagos and Cairo, those places really made me reconsider differences in ethnicities, geography, cultural and religious tensions, politics and economics. When I finished all eight cities in the series in 2001, I realized how problematic the entire world had become. The more I travel,the more challenging and violent the world seems. Eventually, for the 2005 Venice Biennale I decided to create another series of A Needle Woman performances dedicated to cities in conflict, whether this was economic, ethnic, religious, violent or post-colonial in nature. The condition of humanity in each place and my growing inner awareness intersect, leading to deeper and broader questions.

• Daina Augaitis
  Do you work with local people? And is community collaboration important? It seems that the notion of collaboration has evolved in your work.

• Kimsooja
  Actually, I'm not big on collaborating with large groups; I almost have a fear of it. I prefer one-on-one relationships rather than group relationships. But I am getting more involved in collaborative work, and it does offer me valuable experiences. Recent collaborations with communities include working on An Album: Hudson Guild (2009), for which I collaborated with the Hudson Guild Senior Center. Another example is my most recent ongoing film project, Thread Routes (2010–), which focuses on specific weaving communities around the world. In these works I am now physically removed from the viewers, but through my gaze, I explore my perspective through the specific communities that perform their passions, desires and rituals. In Thread Routes these are captured in their textile-related performances, implicating local environmental conditions and the aesthetics of movement that unfold in the actions of their bodies. It goes back to my earlier work displaying an interest in sewing, spinning, wrapping and unwrapping. In a sense, I unwrap their bodies and minds, creating drawings of their movements and life. I feel the psychological dimensions of our bodies are demonstrated when they are unfolding in a performative state.

Time

• Daina Augaitis
  The passage of time is a significant aspect of your work. How do you think about time and impermanence in relation to your work?

• Kimsooja
  I believe not in permanency but in constant transition. Everything is in process and is ephemeral, including my own body. In my earlier works the process of sewing was a journey to the past, present and future, as an internal voyage through space and time. The performance of A Needle Woman afforded me the awakening experience of an internal journey by locating/dislocating the physicality of my own body, which in turn posed questions and suggested different perceptions of time in both my mind and that of the viewer. Yet another special state of perception occurred in A Laundry Woman – Yamuna River, India (2000), the performance in which I was standing on the bank of the Yamuna River. At one point I became confused to such a degree that I could not determine whether it was my body or the river that was moving. How could I be so confused about the relationship between my body and the river? A while after finishing the performance, I came to realize that the reason was because I had been so focused—to the extreme, like the point of a needle, which has no space but only location. And when there is no space but only location, you're open to all dimensionality; you cannot relate your physical body to any particular thing or direction because you are simultaneously unrelated and entirely related within. I had become confused in that zero point of time and space, and it was a profound and humbling moment of awareness of my own ephemerality.
  Also, when I did the second version of A Needle Woman (2005) I focused more on my body as an axis of time: it has more emphasis as a video piece rather than a performance in comparison to the previous version and is presented in slow motion, whereas the first version focuses on my body as an axis of space in a realtime performance. I accentuated a temporal aspect and reduced the tension of the world in this second version by slowing down the video so that passersby have a longer interaction with my body, and this smoothed out even aggressive actions. Also, the viewers' experience of a slightly longer duration during these moments of interaction allows the delicate psychological threads woven into this video to become apparent. Slowing down the video's speed produces an expansion of time and creates a stretched stillness as a result. My body in stillness slows down to the degree of permanency, a zero point of time, the central needle point of a clock. I have been increasingly interested in extending time while observing the phenomenon of duration.

• In An Album : Hudson Guild, the camera focuses on each individual's face for a certain length of time and freezes their movement at one point, thereby seeming to transform a moment into eternity. An awareness of time becomes more obvious in this video through the psychological journeys visible on the faces of each individual, whom I filmed closely for many minutes. It is as if I had stopped each person walking by me in A Needle Woman to give my gaze—carefully and closely, one person at a time—to them and all the individuals who pass through my life. I must say, this creates a continuum linking this work with A Needle Woman, and there is still much to explore in what time can reveal. But time reveals things to us only when we have consciousness.

• Daina Augaitis
  What about the psychological dimension of duration? What's going on in your mind and what connection do you make with the people around you, especially in a piece like A Beggar Woman (2000–2001)?

• Kimsooja
  When I did A Needle Woman, I felt a great empathy for the humanity around me just by gazing at people coming and going. It's a short moment, but in it one can grasp the essence of the ephemerality of human reality. Also I felt a great amount of affection toward the people I encountered. All of those emotions about people were accumulating in my body and embracing me. By the end, I was filled with such fulfilment, peace and happiness. The performance of A Needle Woman was a truly amazing experience for me.

• In the various performances of A Beggar Woman, in contrast to those of A Needle Woman, I relate directly to the specific social reality in a suggestive way by sitting in a pose with my hand outstretched like a beggar. I was not asking for money by posing as a beggar, but instead asking questions by opening my palm to the audience. I didn't expect that people would react by giving real money in this performance. However, I was given money in most places, and I was extremely touched and humbled by this action, as it was a moment of personal communication for me. The interaction and psychology of reacting to a beggar and giving something to him is complicated for both of the people involved. It is a moment of sympathy/expectation, doubt/anti-doubt, hesitation/frustration, willingness/request, withdrawal/disappointment, anxiety/anger and regret/relief—all of which are tensions that are generated between the giver and the receiver. The only place I wasn't given money was in Cairo, but instead I was given an even more valuable gift there: someone placed a baby chick in my hand, and I was so shocked to have this small, warm, moving life in my outstretched palm—in my bottari. Even if it was a playful gesture, the person who gave me the bird had responded to my open question with a profound answer, "A life." Another special experience was the first performance of A Beggar Woman that I did in Mexico City (2000), where I saw and connected with a man from a distance. I had already felt his presence in advance, and I had the intuition that he would give me his money. As soon as I sensed this, I was very touched and couldn't stop weeping as I awaited his action. I tried hard to maintain my stillness. As he slowly approached, he searched for money in his various pockets. Once he found a coin, he slowly came to me and put it carefully into my palm and then left. This was a real response to me, not to a performer. I have learned a great deal from my performances, about people and cultures.

• Daina Augaitis
  I wonder about a piece like Encounter (1998), which is a photograph. As a photographic document, is it therefore more about gesture rather than performance?

• Kimsooja
  Encounter is actually a performative photograph I made in connection with another performative sculpture called Encounter – Looking into Sewing, which I made in 1998 at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel. For this work, I placed a mannequin covered with silk bedcovers at the central intersection of the crossshaped room in the museum's tower and I declared it to be "A Performance." People came and waited, watching the figure/sculpture for a while, expecting some sort of action. When the figure didn't move after a long time, instead of assuming the figure was a performer, the audiences started walking around the figure to try to understand. So I interpreted this interaction on the part of the audience as a kind of "relational performance." That was the original work; the photograph is a re-creation or a record of a similar performative sculpture covering an actual woman inside.

• Daina Augaitis
  The idea of speed is one that Western society is both enthralled with and dependent on. Your work seems to function in the opposite way. Is it your intention to slow things down, to change the speed of engagement?

• Kimsooja
  Rather than being against speed, I suppose my work sets up a certain kind of observation in relation to speed. However, sometimes a speeded-up action can also open up reality. For example, I was in Hawaii for a site-specific installation and then ended up making the video A Wind Woman (2003). I was filming while driving along a mountaintop and at a certain point, when the speed of the camera and the car coincided, the lens captured the hidden threads between the sky and the trees—the border between things and space (something I've always been curious about and wished to define), stretching it into a brushstroke of wind/speed. Stretching space and time enables different relationships to be noticeable and awakens us to see the world from totally different perspectives. So by observing how quickly or slowly I look at things through changing speeds, I have discovered a series of historical phases of abstract painting—Realism, Impressionism, Expressionism and even Minimalism—as a series of momentary transitions of painting practices. It took many centuries in the history of painting to arrive at the point where Gerhard Richter's brushstroke is recognized as a unique painting methodology; however, A Wind Woman, for example, demonstrates different movements of painting in the history of modern painting, revealing visual realities in nature that have always been there.
  I began my practice as a painter, and most of my evolution stems from my position as a painter.

Participation

• Daina Augaitis
  It seems that your work is very much about the connections you make with humanity, but can you imagine a performance in which there is a surrogate body in place of your own?

• Kimsooja
  It is inevitable that I perform A Needle Woman, as it is about not just the visual representation but also the unique experience I have as a person and a practitioner whose body has been contextualizing the notion of a needle for thirty years now. Most of my performances were about not just the form but also my inner experience. The state of mind I achieve while I stand there comes from a particular motivation and autonomy of the status of my body and mind. I notice that my back reveals the neutral identity and my state of mind at the time. The back is actually one of the most honest parts of our body. When I'm not stable or focused, I feel it is visible in my back. It's critical for me to be centred, with a focused state of mind and body. If someone else did this piece, the results as an experience and the tension of the performance would be completely different. I did direct and re-perform a version of A Beggar Woman as the project Conditions of Anonymity (2005) with a group of about twenty-two volunteers, a work that was commissioned by Creative Time in New York. The performance was done in Times Square while the videos A Laundry Woman – Yamuna River, India (2000) and A Beggar Woman – Cairo (2001) were being presented on an LED screen. I couldn't repeat myself by doing the same performance while my videos were presented on-site, but I was able to direct a group performance of the same action. I thought this performance could be experienced by any individual without pretention, and it worked out very well, with participants sharing amazing individual experiences and the interactions of the performance.

• Daina Augaitis
  You speak about your back revealing the truth, but there is also truth in the gaze. Who is the primary audience for you in the case of A Needle Woman? Is it the sea of people walking by you in real life, or are you already thinking of the video projection and the audience that will be behind you?

• Kimsooja
  Both of those are my audiences, and so am I—I, too, am observing from my back while looking forward. At the same time, in order to maintain my body as balanced, I never lock eyes with the passersby. I continuously gaze at a perspective point—a distant needle point. For those watching the video, my body becomes like a vertical needle with a symbolic void in it that allows viewers to enter or erase my body after watching my back for a while, almost like weaving. In the end, it is as if I become an invisible woman whose physicality is erased by waves of people on the street and by audiences—by being watched.

• Daina Augaitis
  At what point does the spectator become part of your work? I was reading Jacques Rancière's Emancipated Spectator, and he writes about the need for theatre to mobilize the viewers as much as the actors. When I watched Hudson Guild, I felt that you had activated the participants and that the border between actor, viewer and action had been blurred.

• Kimsooja
  In a way, An Album: Hudson Guild was an extended version of A Needle Woman but with my body removed and the roles reversed. In the first part of the video, I am watching each individual community member via the camera as he or she stares into its lens, and in the moment each enters his or her own imaginary world—regardless of what he or she is looking at—and looks back at the camera, that gaze answers my voice when I call his or her name. Rather than being anonymous people in the street, here people from the street come and sit and perform their own personality during their psychological journey, which allows their specific individuality to emerge. One might think this video has something to do with Andy Warhol's screen tests, but Warhol's approach to celebrities that had personal relationships with him is just the opposite of mine and has totally different associations to each of the performers in relationship to the audience. The gazes of the people in Hudson Guild become a parallel to A Needle Woman's gaze, because now they observe themselves from a fixed position, although I give them the freedom to be who they are and do what they wish. In the second part of the video, I placed them all together in the audience's seats of a theatre for a group video portrait and filmed them from the centre of the stage—treating the audience as performers and placing the camera in the same position of A Needle Woman. As performers of themselves, they seem like a sort of constellation of humanity in their own embodied bottari in the theatre. The frozen gaze of each individual turns the continuity into discontinuity, and at the same time, it transforms a moment into eternity.
  Once I screened this video in the same theatre in which I had filmed it and invited the performers to attend. Doing so mirrored the audience, raising questions about who is the viewer and who is the performer; what is performed and what is activated/de-activated; who is watched and who is watching; and what are we looking at and what do we really see.

• Daina Augaitis
  This brings our discussion back to the activation of the individual in society. We are all performers in the theatre of life.

• This year’s Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is an anomaly. Curated by commissioner Seungduk Kim, the co-director of Le Consortium in Dijon, the pavilion features Kimsooja’s installation ‘To Breathe: Bottari’ (2013), for which the artist covered the building’s inner surface with mirrors and diffraction grating film sheets. From afar, the pavilion resembles a crystal palace, or a pseudo-architecture that dissipates into the air like a mirage. Only a dozen or so visitors are allowed to enter the translucent pavilion at a time, forming a noticeably long queue during the preview week— giving the act of entering the feel of a privilege or a sacred ritual. At the entrance, the friendly guides tell the visitors to take off their shoes, another ritualistic activity before visitors willingly submit themselves to the pavilion with nothing inside except light and warmth. In a corner tucked in the pavilion, the artist also constructed Breathe: Blackout (2013), a small anechoic chamber of absolute darkness in which only one person at a time can experience the nothingness. The phenomenological exhibition of illumination and blackness as a whole is an anomaly for two reasons. It seems, at least on the surface, far removed from the artist’s previous works, which of ten prey on culturally specific metaphors with a global spin. Additionally, it creates a visual disjuncture from the rest of the Venice Biennale, which I will discuss later. It is a fantastically orchestrated anomaly that is the hidden jewel of this year’s biennale— especially in the context of the Korean Pavilion, the last national pavilion erected in Giardini that celebrates its tenth participation in the art world’s Olympics.

• To give greater context to Kimsooja’s oeuvre: it is rare to discuss the art of Kimsooja without mentioning terms like the artist’s female body, the diasporic identity and global itinerancy. The South Korean-born artist began her overseas career in the mid-1980s, after her study abroad at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In the 1990s, she then quickly joined the circuit of contemporary artists whose frequent traveling coincided with the international art bienniales and galleries in metropolitan cities. Her most celebrated work comprises a range of adaptation and appropriation of bottari (bundles enveloped with silk clothes) and yibul (quilt-like bed covers), which the artist designates under the metaphors of sewing, wrapping, and, more specifically, the Korean cultural tradition embodied in the artist’s self. While weaving yibul with her mother back in 1983, as Kimsooja famously accounts, she rediscovered clothes and needles as her artistic medium, eventually leading her to abandon the canvas and brush. The vibrant silks in Kimsooja’s bottari and yibul series therefore conjure a culturally gendered aura, if not the mystified persona of the artist, wherever the works are installed, either in white cubes (P.S.1, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, etc.) or in site-specific spaces (a public park in Gwangju, the Greenlawn Cemetery in Brooklyn, etc.). In more recent years, she began to perform her pieces standing immobile on the bustling streets of Tokyo, Cairo, Lagos, New York, Shanghai and more, with her back turned away from the viewers. The subject of her videos, titled A Needle Woman (1999 – 2001; 2005), is the diverse portraits and varied reactions of passers-by, of whom the artist, like a ‘needle’, weaves in and out. Here, a question should be raised.

• If Bottari and the act of weaving and wrapping have long functioned as the central theme for the artist—and there is no silk, bundles, or artist’s image posed as a Korean woman in ‘To Breathe: Bottari’ at this year’s Korean Pavilion—how then does this work fit or challenge Kimsooja’s path? Before delving into this question further, I would address the pavilion’s dissonant relationship to the rest of the Biennale. This year’s main exhibition, entitled ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’, is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, which takes inspiration from a 1955 architectural model of the same title. Built by Marino Auriti, an Italian American who dreamt of an imaginary museum housing all the knowledge of the world, the model was of course never realised in real life. The leap of utopian fantasy and artistic obsession, however, are more than alive in Gioni’s own encyclopedia of dynamic contemporary art. Perhaps too similar to what Gioni showcased at the 2010 Gwangju Biennale, this year’s main exhibition in Venice is packed with microcosms constructed by creative, at times erratic, artistic minds. Indeed, the reproduction of portraits or self-images is one significant thread, as seen from the fact that Gioni shared his curatorial authorship with only one other person—Cindy Sherman, who is another inspiration for the curator and to whom he ‘outsourced’ the curation of a room in Arsenale. Sherman’s gallery is, surprisingly, focused on the staged nature of portraits, photographs, and sculptures, exposing the lack of an innate quality in one’s identity. A picture is a picture, even though it is the only means through which to express the self. Likewise, art is not a transparent reflection of the world, but is contingent with the world around us, and is simultaneously world-making.

• Unlike any other worlds imagined in Venice—for example, the Golden Lion winner Edson Chagas’s Angolan Pavilion, which featured still-life photographs as stacks of posters that visitors can collect in a provided folder to make his/her own collection of Angolan images, or Stefanos Tsivopoulos’s Greek Pavilion with a three-channel video about the world of alternative currency— the world proposed by Kimsooja for the Korean Pavilion seems empty. It is at least empty of images created by the artist for the viewer to see. What welcomes the visitors at the Korean Pavilion is the double-bound set of light and darkness, transparency and opacity, which calls for a heightened bodily experience. In the room of light, the viewers confront the images of themselves on intermittently installed planes of mirror on existing walls. Some walls refract the self-images because they are of a half-transparent, half-reflective surface that lets the light from outside.

• Considering Kimsooja’s interests in the female body and self-image, her works like A Needle Woman might strike lines of affiliation with Cindy Sherman’s Film Stills. However, the current installation of the light-filled room with no built-in portraits signifies Kimsooja’s break away from the play on representations and appropriation that have earned her international recognition. It must also be recognised that this trajectory began in 2006, when she enveloped the Crystal Palace at the Reina Sofia with diffraction grating film sheets. Here, Bottari as a metaphor had lost its cultural root in Korean women’s domestic labor and their mobility forced by the country’s rapid modernization; it has become a mere gesture that wraps things, at times even a building. If Bottari previously allegorized the artist’s body, it has now become a bundle as an empty signifier, to which the viewers as breathing bodies enter and look into the self-images. Or as Lacan would say, they would face the images of not-me, the mis-recognized self (méconnaissance).

• That is the magical irony of Kimsooja’s Korean Pavilion. What no longer lingers in the exhibition are the deep-seated metaphors of ‘Koreanness’ based on the artist’s personal history—or to be more precise, pre modern Korean traditions revived as contemporary art tropes which the artist articulated alongside her own transcultural trajectory. The visual and symbolic disappearance of the Korean Pavilion is telling this year, especially when the German and French ones controversially swapped galleries with each other in order to critique the embraced nationalism in the pavilion system at Venice. The magical disappearance of the Korean Pavilion can be said to demonstrate a more compelling aesthetic impact than the Franco-German scandal.

• There is another story to be told about the aptness of Kimsooja’s Bottari for this year’s Korean Pavilion. One has to remember that such a clever visual trick owes much to the fact that the pavilion is essentially built with glass and steel—that is, light materials, compared to the concrete or limestone of any other national pavilion. When selected as this year’s commissioner, Seungduk Kim sought to intervene in the pavilion’s architectural location and history. She was well aware that in 1993, when Nam June Paik shared the Golden Lion award with Hans Haacke, Paik argued with impassioned force for the construction of a national pavilion for Korea. Biennale’s first response to this request was that it was ‘impossible’, as Yongwoo Lee, who collaborated with Paik during the historical moment, accounts in his essay included in the catalogue. The last card that Paik played, and which eventually won South Korea the current site, was, to the surprise of many people today, none other than North Korea. Paik argued that the pavilion would serve both Koreas on cultural terms, at a time when the post-Berlin Wall era had just begun and many conjectured an optimistic future for the divided peninsula. In exchange for the relatively central location of the pavilion, the city of Venice barred the building from obstructing the view onto the Grand Canal located right behind it —hence the current shape and material of the pavilion.

• Of course not a single North Korean artist has ever exhibited in the Korean Pavilion, which is why the mirror play in ‘To Breathe: Bottari’ is tragically beautiful and poignant. It pays homage to the misrecognized political motivation back in 1993, while making self-as-other portraits emerge within the very empty signifier of peace and hope. Moreover, the portraits of visitors are not only replicated through mirror reflection but also fractured and multiplied into numerous fragments via the aluminum sheets laid on the floor. As seen in the picture of the Korean Pavilion, the exhibition hall is less a linear mise-en-abÎme than a kaleidoscopic image composed by a dozen visitors whose dismembered images, like tapered needles, effusively crowd the gigantic Bottari. For such a striking visual metaphor to arise in the Korean Pavilion, the personal allegories of the artistic self had to be minimized. The sound installation of the artist’s breathing titled The Weaving Factory (2004 – 2013) is effectively over to the blackout that the artist experienced in New York during Hurricane

• Sandy takes on a different epistemological spin in the context of the Korean Pavilion. Isn’t the northern half of the peninsula the darkest part of the world, as apparent in the infamous satellite photograph of Northeast Asia? It is quite a coincidence that Minsuk Cho, the Korean commissioner for next year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, announced that his show would feature commentaries on North Korean architecture as well as South Korean. Such a curatorial direction might evince the reality that the marquee ‘COREA’ inscribed on the pavilion’s facade does not indicate either the South or the North. A more convincing tack, however, is that the South Korean arts can only exist because of the presence of Northern society and culture, and vice versa. The binary of light and darkness never promises the absolute but is always already defined in relative terms. In this sense, the political, social, and cultural path-taking of North Korea in the post-Communist era serves not as a catastrophic exception but as an unavoidable symptom of the unidirectional neoliberal march taken by the rest of the world, as if the anomaly of ‘To Breathe: Bottari’ is symptomatic of the Venice Biennale and the Korean Pavilion.

• 올해 베니스비엔날레 한국관은 이례적이다. 프랑스 디종 콩소 시움의 공동디렉터인 김승덕 커미셔너와 작가 김수자의 협업으로 개최된 <호흡: 보따리>전은 한국관 내부 표면을 거울과 반투명 필름으로 뒤덮었다. 자르디니 정원에서 보았을 때 건물 전체가 마치 투명한 유리궁전처럼 혹은 사라져가는 신기루처럼 보인다. 한번에 10명 내외의 관람객 입장할 수 있는 규칙 때문에 프리뷰 기간 내내 함상 길게 줄을 서기다린 뒤, 신발을 벗으라는 가이드의 안내를 받고 발로 전시관에 들어서고 나서야 환한 빛의 공간을 맞닥뜨릴 수 있다. 이러한 전시관 한구석에 절대적인 어둠을 경험할 수 있는 '호흡: 정전’이란 제목의 무향실을 설치했다. 여기는 또 한번에 한 명의 관광객만 입장하여 아무것도 없는 상태를 홀로 경험하도록 했다. 이처럼 빛과 어둠의 현상학적인 경험을 끌어내는 이번 전시는 전체적으로 보았을 때 두 가지 이유에서 이래 혹은 변칙이라 할 수 있다. 우선 표면적으로 이 전시는 종종 한국 문화의 특수한 메타포에 글로벌한 감각을 첨가했던 작가의 지난 작업들과 상당한 거리가 있다. 그리고 나중에 더 다루겠으나, 김수자의 이번 전시는 베니스비엔날레의 다른 국가관 전시들과 견주어 보아도 시각적으로 이례적이다. 하지만 자르디니 공원에 세워진 마지막 국가관으로 미술계의 올림픽인 베니스비엔날레 참여 10회째를 맞이하는 한국관의 문화사적 맥락을 참 고할 때 올해 한국관은 탁월하게 기획된 변칙이며 2013년 베니스 비엔날레의 숨겨진 보물이라 할 수 있다.

• 먼저 김수자 작업의 맥락은 작가의 여성적 신체 디아스포라 정체성 글로벌한 순례 등의 용어를 빼놓고 설명할 수 없다는 점을 강조한다. 1957년 대구에서 태어난 김수자는 프랑스 에콜 데 보자르에서 수학 한 뒤 1980년대 중반부터 해외 미술계에서 활동을 시작했고 곧이 어 1990년대부터 세계적인 미술가 대열에 합류하여 국제적인 비엔날레와 전시를 따라 전 세계 대도시들을 이동해왔다. 작가의 작업 가운데 가장 널리 알려진 것은 보따리와 이불을 차용하고 활용한 것으로 이러한 소재들은 바늘을 이용해 천을 꿰매거나 오브제를 천으로 감싸고 다시 튀거나 푸는 행위에 대한 비유로 언급되었다. 좀 더 정 확히 말해 보따리와 이불은 작가 자신의 내면에 새겨진 한국적인 문화의 전통을 표상한다. 잘 알려진 일화에 따르면 작가는 1983년 어머니와 함께 이불을 꿰매던 중 그동안 대학의 미술교육으로 익숙해진 캔버스와 붓을 포기하고 천과 바늘을 작업의 주요 매체로 쓰겠다는 깨달음을 얻었다고 한다. 따라서 뉴욕의 P.S.1. 리옹의 현대미술관 등의 화이트큐브 안에 설치되거나 광주의 산등성이 혹은 브루클린의 공동묘지 등의 장소 특정성을 띤 야외에 놓이는 것에 별 관계 없이 김수자의 이불과 보따리 작업에 쓰인 비단의 화려한 색상은 문 화적(한국적)이며 젠더적(여성적인 코드가 덧씌워진 아우라를 표 출하며 작가의 신비화된 페르소나 또한 자아낸다. 최근 10여 년 동안 작가는 도쿄, 카이로 라고스, 뉴욕, 상하이 등 여러 도시의 붐비 는 거리 한가운데서 관람객들에게서 등을 돌린 채 움직이지 않고서 있는 퍼포먼스를 펼치고 이를 영상작업으로 남기기도 했다. ‘바늘 여인’(1999~2001: 2005)으로 명명된 이 영상작업 시리즈의 주제는 작가의 모습이 아닌 그녀를 지나치는 행인들의 다양한 초상과 반용들이라 할 수 있다. 여기서 작가는 자신을 보이지 않는 바늘로서 수많은 도시들의 외면과 이면을 엮는 매체로 상징화한다.

• 그렇다면 <호흡: 보따리> 전시에서 과연 보따리는 실재하는가? 전시 에서 바늘의 메타포가 지속되는가? 이 질문에 대답하기에 앞서, 먼저 한국관이 베니스비엔날레의 본 전시나 다른 국가관과 비교했을 때 어떤 이례적 면모를 보이는지 언급하고자 한다. 올해 베니스비엔날레 본 전시는 <백과사전식 궁전>으로 기획을 맡은 마시밀리아노 지오니는 1955년에 이탈리아계 미국인 건축가 마리노 아우리티가 착상한 건축 모델에서 전시에 대한 영감을 얻었다. 아우리티의 건축 모델은 세계의 모든 지식을 담은 상상 속 박물관으로, 물론 실제로 구현되지는 않았다. 그렇지만 그가 꿈꿨던 유토피아적 환상과 예술 적인 집착은 마시밀리아노 지오니가 구축한 동시대 미술의 백과사전 에서 역동적인 것 이상으로 구현되었다. 어쩌면 3년 전 지오니기 최한 2010년 광주비엔날레에서 보여준 것과 지나치게 비슷할 수도 있지만, 올해 베니스비엔날레 본 전시는 창조적이며 때로는 예측 불가능한 예술적 사고로 구축된 수많은 소우주로 가득했다. 초상이나 자화상의 이미지는 올해 본 전시의 주요한 축이었고, 이는 지오니가 전시의 유일한 공동큐레이터로 신디 셔먼을 선택한 데서도 살펴볼 수 있다. 지오니는 신디 셔먼을 자신의 전시 세계의 영감으로 삼는다며 그녀에게 아르세날레진의 전시실 하나를 아웃소싱하였다. 신디 셔먼이 기획을 맡은 전시실은 너무나도 당연히 초상화와 사진, 조각의 연출된 성격에 초점을 맞추었고, 정체성은 본질적 속성의 결여로 재현됨을 역설했다. 이미지는 언제나 이미지일 뿐이지만 이미지 재현은 자아를 표현하기 위한 유일한 수단일 수 있다. 이처럼 예술은 세계를 투명하게 반영하지 않으며 우리를 둘러싼 세계에 걸쳐져 있는 동시에 세계를 구축하는 것이다.

• 본 전시와 마찬가지로 올해 비엔날레에 참여한 여러 국가관은 다양한 방식으로 각각의 세상을 상상 구축하는 경향을 보였다. 예를 들어 에드슨 치가스가 참여하여 황금사자상을 받은 앙골라 국가관은 길가에 놓여진 정물의 사진을 포스터로 인쇄하여 전시장에 쌓아두고 관람객들이 미리 배포된 폴더에 각자 앙골라에 대한 이미지 컬렉션을 만들 수 있게 했으며, 스테파노스 치보포물로스를 내세운 그리스 국가관은 금융위기에 관한 사유로 대안화폐에 관한 3채널 영상 작업을 선보였다. 하지만 김수자가 참여한 한국관 전시는 이와 상반되게 텅 빈 듯 보이는 세계를 제시한 점에서 주목할 만하다. 김수자의 전시장은 적어도 관람객이 감상할 수 있는 이미지를 작가가 제공하지 않는다는 점에서 텅 비어 있는 것이다. 한국관을 찾은 이들을 맞이하는 것은 이중으로 구속된 빛과 어둠, 투명함과 불투명함으로 긴장된 육체적 경험을 유발한다. 관람객은 빛으로 이루어진 방에서 전시장 의 기존 벽면 이곳저곳에 설치된 거울에 비친 제 모습과 맞닥뜨린다. 전시장 내벽의 일부는 이러한 이미지들을 굴절하는데 반투명, 반반 사 소재로 만들어져 외부의 빛 혹은 풍경 또한 비추기 때문이다. 어둠의 방에서는 시청각적 경험을 최소화시키고 선험적 느낌만을 강조한다.

• 1980년대부터 지속된 여성의 신체와 자아 이미지에 관한 작가의 관심을 고려해볼 때, ‘바늘여인'과 같은 작업들은 신디 셔먼의 '영화 스틸’ 작업과 유사성을 지닌다고 볼 수도 있다. 하지만 벽에 걸린 작업 없이 빛으로만 공간을 채운 설치를 선보인 이번 전시는 그동안 작가가 국제적인 명성을 얻는데 이바지한 재현과 전유의 놀이에서 탈피했음을 알린다. 한편 이러한 흐름은 이미 2006년부터 전조를 보였다. 레이나 소피아 미술관의 크리스털 궁을 둘러싼 작업이 바로 그것이다. 이 작업에서 보따리는 한국 여성들의 가사노동과 급격한 현대화로 빚어진 불가피한 이동이라는 한국적 뿌리를 상실하며 사물을 감싸는 하나의 제스처로 변환된다. 물론 싸고 묶는 제스처의 대상은 종종 건물 전체가 되기도 한다. 초기 작업에서 보따리가 작가의 신체를 비유했다면 이제 보따리는 텅 빈 기표가 된 것이다. 관람객들은 호흡하는 신체로서 김수자의 작업 안에 들어가 자아이미지를 바라 보게 된다. 라캉식으로 말해보면 관람객들은 나 아닌 것(not-me) 혹은 오류 인식된 자아(meconnaissance)를 마주하는 것이다.

• 이번 베니스비엔날레에서 김수자의 한국관이 선보이는 마술적인 아이러니는 바로 여기에 있다. 김수자의 작품 세계 깊숙이 자리 잡은 한국적인 것에 대한 은유, 정확히는 동시대 미술의 비유로 부활한 전 근대적인 한국의 전통과 더불어 한국과 미국을 오가는 작가의 인생 발자취에 기반을 둔 탈식민지적 망명에 빗댄 작품 해설은 한국관과 함께 자취를 감췄다. 소위 한국적인 것과 더불어 한국관이 시각적으로 그리고 상징적으로도 소멸한 것은 올해 베니스비엔날레의 맥락에 서 강력한 효과를 자아낸다. 이는 특히 바로 옆에 위치한 독일과 프랑스가 베니스비엔날레의 국가관 체제에 내재한 국가주의를 비판하고자 서로 전시장을 맞바꾼 것에 비추어보았을 때 더욱 그러하다. 한국관이 김수자의 작업을 통해 마술적으로 자취를 감추어버린 것은 프랑스와 독일이 일으킨 일련의 스캔들보다 더 충격적이고 정교한 미적 효과를 자아낸다고 할 수 있다.

• 이번 한국관 기획과 작업은 또 다른 맥락에서 적절하다. 여기서 우리 는 작가의 재치있는 시각적 속임수가 한국관 건물이 유리와 강철로 세워졌기에 가능했음을 기억해야 한다. 다시 말해 콘크리트나 대리 석 등으로 세워진 다른 국가관들에 비해 한국관은 시각적으로 가벼운 소재로 구성되어 있다는 것이다. 김승덕 큐레이터는 커미셔너로 선정된 후 한국관의 건축과 위치, 역사에 관해 언급하는 전시를 기획 하고자 노력했는데, 한국관의 기원은 정확히 20년을 거슬러 올라가 1993년에서 찾을 수 있다. 이때 백남준은 한스 하케와 더불어 독일 관을 대표해 황금사자상을 받았고, 이미 몇 해 전부터 구상해온 한국관 건립 논의를 베니스 시에 강력히 건의했다. 백남준의 요청은 "불가능하다"라는 차가운 대답으로 돌아왔는데, 한국관 건립에 관해서는 이 역사적인 순간을 함께했던 이용우 광주비엔날레 이사장이 이번 한국관 전시 도록에 기고한 글에서 자세히 기술했다. 지금의 관점 에서는 꽤 어처구니없는 발상이지만 한국관 건립 과정에서 백남준이 던진 마지막 승부수는 새로 지어질 한국관이 문화적인 측면에서 남한과 북한 모두를 위한 것이라 주장하는 것이었다. 당시는 베를린 장벽이 무너진 직후로 한반도 분단체제의 미래에 관해 낙관적인 전망이 범람했고, 그 결과 한국은 이례적으로 뒤늦게 자르디니 공원의 마 지막 국가관을 획득했다. 베니스 시 당국은 한국이 상대적으로 중심 부에 가까운 지점에 건물을 세우도록 허가하는 대신 건물이 뒤편의 대운하를 가리지 못하도록 했고, 이러한 이유로 한국관 건물의 형태 와 소재는 지금과 같이 가볍고 투명하며 소규모일 수밖에 없었다.

• 물론 한국관에서 지금까지 북한 작가가 소개된 적은 단 한 번도 없다. 하지만 이런 점 역시 <호흡: 보따리>에 쓰인 거울이라는 소재가 비극적인 아름다움과 신랄함을 전달하는 이유가 된다. 김수자의 작업은 한국관 건립이 이뤄진 1993년으로 거슬러 올라가는 정치적인 오류 인식을 오마주하며, 평화와 희망이라는 텅 빈 기표 안에서 떠 오르는 타자로서의 자아의 초상을 만들어낸다. 그리고 더 나아가 관람객의 초상은 벽에 설치된 거울에 반사될 뿐만 아니라 바닥과 천 장에 설치된 알루미늄 패널에 의해서 수없이 많은 파편된 이미지로 복사, 재생된다. 사진으로 기록된 한국관의 모습에서 볼 수 있듯이 전시장은 정돈된 모습의 미장아빔(mise-en-abime)이 아닌 좁은 공간을 공유하는 10여 명의 자아들의 만화경 이미지를 성립한다. 관람객들은 텅 빈 보따리 안에 들어가는 순간 수많은 뾰족 바늘이 되어 보따리를 가득 채우는 것이다.

• 한국관에서 이처럼 충격적인 시각적 은유를 끌어올리기 위해 작가의 자아에 관한 개인적인 은유는 최소화된 것 같다. 작가의 호흡으로 만든 사운드 작업 ‘더 위빙 팩토리 '(2004~2013)는 빛의 전시관에 설치되어 있지만 전시관의 시각적 요소에 사실상 압도되며, 작가가 허리케인 샌디 상륙 기간에 뉴욕에서 겪은 정전을 바탕으로 구축했다는 무반향실은 한국관의 역사적 맥락에서 또 다른 의미를 얻는다. 동북아시아를 촬영한 위성사진 이미지를 통해 잘 알려졌다시피, 한반도의 북쪽 절반은 사실상 전 세계에서 가장 어두컴컴한 부분이 아니 었던가? 내년 베니스비엔날레 건축전 한국관 커미셔너로 선정된 조민석이 남한만 아니라 북한 건축에 대한 포섭을 발표한 것은 이런 점에서 꽤 심상치 않은 우연일 것이다. 이런 발상은 한국관에 새겨진 'COREA'라는 푯말이 남한과 북한 어느 한 곳만을 지칭하는 것이 아니라는 점으로 뒷받침할 수도 있다. 하지만 그보다 남한의 문화가 한 반도 북쪽의 사회와 예술의 존재를 통해 비로소 지금의 형태를 띠는 것이고 북쪽 역시 사정은 마찬가지라는 것이 더 큰 이유로 작용한다. 빛과 어둠은 절대적인 것이 아니라 언제나 상대적이라는 것을 우리는 너무도 잘 알고 있지 않는가. 그런 점에서 지난 20년간의 북한의 사회·문화·정치적 행보는 그다지 이례적인 것이 아니라 오히려 점점 한 방향으로 몰려가는 전 지구적 흐름의 한 징후로 작동하는 것 같다. 마치 <호흡: 보따리>의 이례성 또한 베니스비엔날레와 한국관의 징후로 그 날카로운 아름다움을 드러내는 것처럼.

• 김수자는 1957년 대구에서 태어나 홍익대학교와 동 대학원에서 회화를 전공했다. 1984년 파리의 국립고등미술학교에서 수학하였다. 주요 개인전으로 마이애미뮤지엄의 <김수자: 바늘여인>(2012), 영광 원자력발전소 아트프로젝트(2010), 아틀리에 에르메스의 <지-수-화-풍전>(2009), 리히텐슈타인 쿤스트뮤지엄에서 주최한 <뭄바이: 빨래터>(2010), 영국 발틱센터의 <바늘여인>(2009), 브뤼셀 BOZAR의 <로투스: 영의 지점>(2008), 마드리드 레이나 소피아의 크리스탈팰리 스에서의 <호흡: 거울여인>, 베니스 라 페니체극장과 폰다치오네 베비라콰라마 사에서의 <호흡>(2006), 리옹현대미술관, 뒤셀도르프 뮤지움쿤스트팔라스트, 밀라 노PAC에서의 순회전인 <인간의 조건>(2003~04), PS1 현대미술센터와 MoMA의 <바늘여인>(2001), 쿤스트할레 베른의 <김수자>(2001) 등이 있다. 그룹전으로는 베니스의 <아르템포(Artempo)>, <인-파니툼(In-Finitum)>, <움직이는 도시 (Cities on the Move)> 순회전 뿐만 아니라 포츠난비엔날레(2010), 모스크바비엔날레(2009), 베니스비엔날레(2005, 1999), 휘트니비엔날레(2002), 부산비엔날레 (2002), 상파울로비엔날레(1998), 이스탄불비엔날레(1997), 광주비엔날레 (1995, 2000) 등이 있다.

• 올해로 10번째 전시를 여는 한국관엔 설치작가 김수자가 참여했다. 1999년, 2005년 본전시에 두 차례, 비엔날레 공식 기획전 등 지금까지총 6차례에 걸쳐 베니스비엔날레에 참여했던 작가는 드디어 '예술적 망명의 길을 끝냈다. 1999년 본전시에서 코소보 전쟁 난민들에게 헌정하는 보따리 트럭 작업을 소개했던 작가가 이번 전시에는 한국관 전체를 숨쉬는 보따리로 바꿔 놓았다. 전시 제목은 〈호흡: 보따리 (To Breathe: Bottari)〉.

• 신발을 벗고 한국관에 들어서면 아무 것도 설치되어 있지 않다. 그저 빈공간과 그 안을 배회하는 관객들만 보일 뿐이다. 바닥은 거울로, 유리벽은 반투명필름(회절격자필름)으로 뒤덮여져, 텅 빈 공간은 오직 외부의 움직임 때문에 일렁이는 무지개 빛으로만 가득하다. 작은 수정궁이라할까? 관객은 빛의 공간 속에서 작품을 스스로 완성해 간다. 그 공간속을 거니는 동안, 작가의 숨소리를 녹음한 사운드 퍼포먼스 작품 <더 위빙 팩토리(The Weaving Factory)>를 동시에 체험하게 된다.

• 빛의 궁전속을 한동안 거닐고 난 후 줄을 서서 또 하나의 공간으로 들어가게 된다. 이른바 <호흡: 정전(Black Out)>이라고 하는, “자궁이자 무덤이기도 하고 삶과 죽음이 공존하는 공간, 어둠의 공간이다. 아무소리도 들리지 않고 오직 흑암만이 가득한 공간속에서 관객들은 조금 전에 체험했던 빛의 잔영을 지워버린다. 빛과 어둠으로 유위(有)와 무위(無爲)의 의미를 존재론적으로 체험하게 만든다.

• <보따리>, <바늘여인>, <실의 궤적> 시리즈 등을 발표하면서 삶과 예술의 직조에 일관된 작품세계를 보여 왔던 작가답게 김수자는 "미국 뉴욕에 머물 당시 허리케인 샐리 때문에 1주일간 전기, 물공 급 같은 것이 멈춰버린 적이 있었는데 그 경험을 녹일 것"이라고 비엔날레 참여 직전 밝힌 바있다.

• "한국관 자체를 하나의 거대한 보따리로 변모시켜, 그동안 집적된 보따리의 개념과 문맥을 총체적으로 드러내는 작업이다. 보따리 결정판이다. 한국관 전체를 보따리의 개념으로 생각하고 자연과실 내 공간이 나뉘는 경계지점을 반투명 필름으로 싸보았다. 건물외부의 유리창을 하나의 피부로, 한국관을 내몸으로 제시한 작업이다. 빛의 밝기나 움직이는 방향에 따라 온종일 변화하는 작업이다. 보따리의 싸고 푸는 성격, 빛과소리를 최대한 밀도 높게 전개하였다. 특히 신체적으로 맞닿는 관객의 체험을 유도하려 했다. 빛과 어둠이 하나로 연결돼 있음을 보여주고 싶었다. 또 <호흡: 정전>에서는 내 숨소리가 차단된 곳에서 관객이 자신의 호흡을 마주하는 경험을 갖도록 하고 싶었다. 빛도 어둠의 일부이며, 어둠 없이 빛이 존재할수 없다. 어둠 속에서 자기 몸만 느끼다가 쏟아지는 빛 가운데로 나와 다시 태어나는 느낌을 갖도록 했다. 30년간 작업을 총체적이면서도 가장 비물질화된 환경으로 제시한 것이다. 거대한 보따리로 상징되는 한국관은 인간과 자연, 어둠과 빛, 남과 여, 음과 양의 상호관계가 비물질적으로 구현된 작품이다. 극단적으로 대립되는 개념 같지만 삶과 죽음, 빛과 어둠이 하나이듯 결국 모두가 연결된 것이 아니겠느냐. 자궁 속에서 접한 어둠, 마지막 숨을 내쉴 때 만나는 어둠, 두 어둠은 결국 빛의 연장이기도 하다. 인간과 자연, 어둠과 빛, 소리와 정적 등을 체험하며 자신의 인식 체계와 감각 체계를 돌아보고 새롭게 하는 계기가 되었으면 좋겠다. 자발적 망명에서 모국으로부터 받은 가장 영예스러운 초대이다. 1999년 한국을 떠나면서 '망명작가’처럼 살았다. 이번 기회에 모국과의 관계를 새롭게 만들어보려고 했다."

• 이번 한국관 커미셔너인 김승덕(프랑스 르 콩소르시엄 공동디렉터)은 "외관이 유리로 되어 있어 매번 커미셔너를 괴롭혀온 전시 공간의 문제점을 오히려 프로젝트의 중요한 이슈로 삼고 한국관의 구조물에 정면으로 맞서고 도전하는 방법을 조사했다."고 밝혔다.

• "애당초 작가에게 제시한 한국관의 기준은 두 가지였다. 첫째는 화이트큐브 콘셉트에서 벗어나 비물질적인 요소로 구성하는 방법. 둘째는 옥상에서 바다가 보이고 나무가 울창한 한국관 주변의 자연적인 요소를 살리는 방법. 자연을 안으로 끌어들이고 안에서 밖을 내다볼수 있는 비물질적인 것을 기준으로 제시했다. 한국관의 특징과 건축구조를 전시의 주요 방향으로 채택하여, 기존의 공간을 변형시키는 대신 한국관 고유의 건축적 특징을 부각시킨 장소특정적 프로젝트로 진행하였다. 전시장의 작품은 작가가 새로 만들어낸 것이 아니라 이미 존재하는 햇빛과 어둠, 숨소리다. 작가에게 까다롭기로 유명한 한국관 건축물 자체를 작품으로 승화시켰다. 관객에게는 새롭고 초월적인 공간 경험이 되는동시에 스스로 적극적인 퍼포머가 되도록 유도하려 했다. 빛과 어둠, 소리와 정적 등이 극명하게 대비된 조건 속에서 자신들의 감각과 인식을 곤두세우게 될 것이다. 인간과 현대문명 제반조건에 문제를 제기하는 전시가 될 것이다. 빛과 색들로 이루어진 순간을 경험하고 블랙홀로 빨려 들어가는 여행이 될 것 이다.무언가를 많이 넣거나 빼지 않고 그저 반투명 필름으로 한국관을 보따리처럼 싸서 우리가 늘 보는 빛을 통해 새로운 경험을 체험케하고, 진짜 고요가 무엇인지 느낄수 있게 만들고 싶었다."

• 한국문화예술위원회(위원장 권영빈)의 일원들과 함께 전시장을 찾은 시인 고은은 "다른 국가관 전시는 자기 주장을 너무 강하게 펼쳐 시끄러웠는데 여기는 차분하게 가라앉았다. 마치 작가가 조용히 사라진 것 같은 작업이다. 전시장에서 마치 엄마의 몸, 자궁 속 태아와 같이 스스로가 정화된 느낌을 받았다."라고 말했다. 또한 중국의 독립 큐레이터 황두는 "빛, 어둠, 명상, 간결함 등이 떠오른다."면서 한국관을 호평했다.

• 2013 베니스비엔날레 국제미술전 한국관이 6월 1일 개막과 함께 일반에 공개됐다. 올해 한국관 전시는 프랑스 현대미술센터 르콩소르시움 공동디렉터인 김승덕이 커미셔너를 맡아 ‘보따리’ 작가로 널리 알려진 김수자의 작품을 전시했다. 김수자는 ‘호흡-보따리’란 제목의 설치작품으로 한국관을 빛과 어둠의 공간으로 나누어 관객들에게 신선한 충격을 안겨주고 있다. 올해 베니스비엔날레 한국관과 주제관, 주요 국가관들의 전시를 따라가 본다.

• 올해 한국관의 작가와 작업을 소개하기 전에, 먼저 특별전에 대한 이야기를 하지 않을 수 없다. 베니스비엔날레는 시작 당시 만국박람회의 미술 버전이었기 때문에 오랫동안 자르디니를 중심으로 하는 국가관 모델로 지속되어 왔다. 그러나 1998년부터 소위 보다 복잡한 경향들의 동시대 미술씬이 강력해지면서 기획력과 방향 제시가 가능한 큐레이터들을 초대하여 특별전을 마련하기 시작했다. 헤럴드 제만의 아페르튀토를 시작으로 올해의 마시밀리아노 지오니(Massimiliano Gioni)에 이르기까지 수많은 주요 큐레이터들의 특별전들은 지난
  십여 년간의 베니스비엔날레를 이끄는 견인차 역할을 했을 뿐 아니라, 나아가 국제 미술의 향방을 점치는 순간들로 여겨져 왔다.

• 동시대 미술에 있어 새로운 형식이나 경향들은 이미 포화상태에 달하였고 그만큼 새로운 비전의 제시가 점점 어려워지고 있다. 미술 내부에 새로움의 신화가 공황상태를 맞이한 오늘날, 21세기 동시대 미술 현장을 타개해 나가려는 노력 중에 눈에 띄는 방법론이라면 리서치와 아카이브와 같은 수집과 연구적 태도일 것이다. 이번 베니스비엔날레의 특별전, ‘백과사전적 궁전(the Encyclopedic Palace)’ 역시 리서치를 방법론으로 취하고 있다. 이것은 과거와 현재를 축적하고 재발견하는 방법이자 동시대를 재탄생시키는 과정으로 유효하다. 하지만 리서치와 아카이브적 방법론을 전체화하거나 지극히 일반화하지 않도록 주의를 기울여 접근해야 한다.

• | 김수자의 보따리- 비우고 빛으로 채우기

• 이러한 가운데 올해 한국관은 1인의 작가 선택에 집중하던 기존 방식을 지속하면서도, 한계로 여겨져 왔던 전시 공간을 급진적으로 활용하여 비움을 통해 완성하는 새로운 방식을 제시하고 있다. 이번 한국관은 90년대 동시대 미술부터 현재를 관통해 김승덕, 김수자 세대의 주관과 고집에 입각한 선택을 보여주고 있다. 큐레이터인 김승덕 씨는 프랑스를 기반으로 90년대부터 왕성한 활동을 보여 왔으며, 작가로 초대된 김수자 씨 역시 뉴욕 기반으로 90년대부터 국제적인 활동을 통해 잘 알려져 있는 작가로 한국의 전통적인 ‘보따리’에 담긴 여성주의적 역사나 유랑, 보따리 천의 짜임과 색채 등 보따리로부터 함의되는 다양한 요소들을 소재로 오랜 기간 작업해 왔다.

• 작가로서 국제적으로 오랜 활동을 한 만큼 이미 김수자 작가에 대한 정보는 보편적으로 알려진 바가 많다. 때문에 새로운 버전의 보따리 오브제나 보따리가 은유적으로 확장된 노마딕한 여정과 풍광을 드러내는 영상 작업이 예측될 만한 상황이었지만, 결과적으로 기획자와 작가는 공간은 비우고 오랫동안 전시 공간으로서의 한국관의 문제나 한계에 대한 논란을 적극적으로 보듬어 앉으면서도 빛이라는 요소를 통해 그 공간을 매우 적극적으로 탈바꿈하는데 성공했다. 사실 어떤 측면에서 꽉 찬 수집품 박물관의 피로감을 안고 자르디니로 향했을 때 한국관은 잠시 하나의 색다른 명상적 공간을 통해 숨 쉴 자리를 마련해 준다. 이 빛의 공간은 오랜 세월 김수자 작업의 인상을 결정해왔던 다양한 색들의 조합으로 만들어지는 보따리 천의 요소나 한국적인 오리엔탈리즘의 정서를 절제와 수용 사이에서 아름답게 조율하고 있다. 이 공간은 무엇보다 조도나 날씨 상태에 따라 공간에서 경험되는 빛이 달라지기 때문에, 관람객이 날을 달리해 재차 방문한다면 재현 불가능한 매일의 서로 다른 경험을 가져갈 수 있다. 아마도 비워진 공간 내부로 창을 통해 스며드는 오묘한 빛들은 건물이 전시장으로써 기능하지 못하지만 국가관이라는 거대 서사에서 방문자들을 위한 새로운 ‘집’의 소서사의 의미를 찾게 해준다. 그뿐 아니라 이러한 정서적인 경험은 비규범성을 강력하게 통제된 공간에 패키지화한 백인 남성 큐레이터의 ‘백과사전적 궁전’과는 대조적인 면모라 할 수 있다. 물성을 절제하면서도 명상적 공간으로 관람객을 맞이하는 있는 이 공간은 동아시아 배경을 가진 여성의 유연함과 수용력을 기반으로 완성되고 있으며, 여기서 또한 김수자 작가의 작업에 대한 새로운 향방을 보여주려는 큐레이터의 노력을 간과해서는 안 될 것이다. 마지막으로 관람객은 빛의 공간 후 암흑으로 가득 찬 작은 방에서 1분간 보내게 되는데 이것은 마치 극적 구성과도 같은 단절로써 전시적 내러티브를 완성하게 된다.

• 국가 간의 국경을 자유롭게 넘나드는 글로벌한 사회가 펼쳐져 왔지만 역설적으로 국경의 문제는 곳곳에서 더욱 첨예하다. 아이러니하게도 베니스비엔날레는 국가주의에 대한 공공연한 로맨스가 허락되는 유일한 영역이기도 하지만 너무나 거대한 국제 행사라는 점에서 큐레이터들에게 이러한 문제는 늘 어딘가 불편한 동참이다. 때문에 단일한 국가이데올로기를 다원화하고 이상적인 초국가성을 예술적 이상과 함께 추구해 온 수많은 큐레이터들의 노력은 2000년대 이후 지속적으로 시도되고 있다. 오늘날에는 자르디니 안에 수용되지 못한 국가들이 베니스 전역에 흩어져 자르디니 국가관들의 패권성을 견제할 뿐 아니라 더 좋은 전시들로 자르디니의 나태함을 대조적으로 드러내고 있다. 실제로 올해 주목받은 대부분의 국가관은 자르디니 외부에 존재한다. 한국관 역시 이러한 점에서는 좀 더 다른 기획적 혁신이 요구되기도 한다. 한편 대체로 신선한 전시적 접근보다는 작가 1인의 대표성으로 귀결되는 한국관의 한계는 사실 전시 공간으로써의 적합성이나 그 한계가 늘 도마에 오르는 한국관 내부 공간의 문제로부터 기인하는 점도 크기 때문에 이러한 문제를 타개할 근본적인 고민도 함께 필요하다.

‘보따리 작가’로 미술계뿐만 아니라 일반에게도 익히 알려진 한국 현대미술의 대표작가 김수자가 2013 베니스비엔날레 한국관 출품작가로 선정되었다. 그녀는 뉴욕에 거주하며 일 년의 절반 정도를 해외의 다양한 전시일정으로 보내고 있고 해외에서 이미 한국 현대미술의 아이콘으로 확고한 자리를 점하고 있다. 실제로 오래 전에 베니스비엔날레의 본전시에도 두 번이나 초대된 경험이 있는 작가에게는 이번 한국관 참가는 다소 늦은 감이 없지 않다. 이번 참가를 계기로 그녀가 계획하고 있는 출품작에 대한 구상과 그의 작품세계, 그가 바라보는 세계 화단에 있어서의 한국 현대미술의 정황과 과제, 그리고 한국 미술을 좀 더 효율적으로 세계무대에 등단시키기 위한 정책적 과제에 대한 입장을 들어보고 그의 향후작품 활동 계획에 대해 알아본다.

• 김찬동
  금년 베니스비엔날레 한국관 작가로 선정되신 것을 축하드립니다. 국제무대에서 왕성한 활동을 통해 이미 오래 전에 상파울로비엔날레에도 참가하셨고 베니스비엔날레 본전시에도 참가경력이 있지만 특별히 이번에 작가로 선정된 소감을 간단히 말씀해 주신다면?

• 김수자
  90년대 후반 IMF 시절의 열악한 경제, 문화적 상황에서의 상파울로비엔날레 국가관 참여 이후 한국을 떠나 활동해 온 저로서는, 당시로부터 거의 한 세기가 지난 지금, 놀라운 물질적 성장과 사회문화적 발전을 이뤄내고 있는 한국을 대표한다는 사실이 새롭고, 늘 아웃사이더의 시각으로 한국 사회를 바라보다가 제 자신이 인사이더가 될 수 있다는 사실에 격세지감을 느낍니다. 아무튼 개인적으로는 뜻밖의 영광이며 국가가 지지하는 비엔날레가 과연 제게 무엇을 의미하는지 자문해 봅니다.

• 김찬동
  ‘보따리 작가’로 이름을 떨치면서 동양성, 여성성, 노마디즘, 생태학 등과 관련된 주제로 일련의 작업을 해오고 계신데 이번 전시를 위해 선보이실 작품은 어떤 내용입니까?

• 김수자
  국가관 건물 자체를 하나의 ‘보따리’ 개념으로 파악하였고, 가능한 한 만들지 않으면서 있는 그대로의 건축적 조건과 문제들을 출발점으로 건축 내에서 비물질적 보따리를 싸는 동시에 펼쳐 보이는 작업을 선보일 계획입니다. 즉 외부의 자연을 끌어들여 내부에 펼치고, 또 내부공간의 구조적 요소들을 열고 싸면서 외부의 자연을 조응하는, 보따리의 개념이 확장된 작업으로서 빛과 소리가 이를 매개할 것입니다. 특별히 지난해 뉴욕에서 경험하였던 자연의 재앙인 허리케인 샌디(Sandi)의 개인적인 경험이 기존의 작업에 본질적이고도 새로운 콘셉트의 방향성을 갖게 했습니다. 그리고 비물질적인 접근을 한국관의 기본 개념으로 설정한 커미셔너의 전시방향과도 공통적인 일치점을 찾은 것 같습니다.

• 김찬동
  전시 참가기간 중 별도의 부대 행사 같은 것을 검토하고 있나요?

• 김수자
  커미셔너와 많은 대화가 진행되고 있는 상태지만 늘 프로그레시브한 것에 관심을 갖고 대화중인 것만은 틀림없습니다. 예산이 허락한다면 가능할 것입니다.

• 김찬동
  다양한 비엔날레에 직간접적으로 참여한 경험을 갖고 계신데 개인적으로 베니스비엔날레는 어떤 의미를 가집니까?

• 김수자
  개인적으로 베니스와 인연이 깊다고 생각하는데, 1995년 국립현대미술관이 주관한 ‘호랑이 꼬리’전에서의 보따리 설치작업을 시작으로, <보따리 트럭> 거울설치와 <바늘여인>을 선보였던 비엔날레 본전시(1999, 2005), 그리고 비엔날레 공식행사였던 ‘ArtTempo’에서의 <빨래하는 여인>, ‘비디오 보따리’를 콘셉트로 선보였던 베빌라콰 라마사 파운데이션과 라 페니체 극장에서의 개인전 ‘호흡’ 등 베니스에서의 일련의 전시들은 지속적이고 일관된 보따리 개념에의 전개과정 하나하나의 매듭을 푸는 전시들이었습니다. 이번에 보따리 개념이 비물질적이고 총체적인 요소로서 장소 특정적 설치작업으로 보인다는 점에서 베니스비엔날레는 국제적으로 가장 중요한 비엔날레인 동시에 제 작업의 핵심적인 맥을 순차적으로 짚을 수 있었던 가장 중요한 비엔날레라고 할 수 있어 개인적으로 더욱 중요하다고 할 수 있습니다. 그런 의미에서 다시 베니스에서 국가의 지원을 받으며 보따리 개념의 총체를 보여줄 수 있게 된 것을 행운이라고 생각합니다.

• 김찬동
  뉴욕에 거주하며 다양한 국가에서의 전시경험을 가지고 계신데, 해외미술계에서 바라보는 한국 현대미술의 가능성과 위상을 어떻게 판단하고 계신가요? 한국의 젊은 작가들에게 국제무대에서 생존과 관련하여 조언이 있다면 무엇입니까?

• 김수자
  과거와 달리 그동안 한국 미술계의 노력과 발전이 가시화 되어온 지 수년이 되었습니다. 이는 많은 젊은 작가들의 해외 진출이나 중견작가들과 원로들의 주요 미술관에서의 초대전이 반증합니다. 아무리 좋은 작가라도 국가나 미술계의 지원이 없다면 오늘 같은 물질만능의 경쟁사회에서 살아남기가 쉽지는 않을 것입니다. 그리하여 국력이 세계미술사에서의 자리매김에 중요한 요소로 작용한다는 것을 우리는 목격하고 있습니다. 하지만, 무엇보다 중요한 것은 작가들의 치열한 작가정신일 것입니다. 그리고 그 작가정신은 작업행위 자체에 있다기보다 작가의 삶의 태도에 기인한다고 봅니다. 일거수일투족이 속일 수 없는 작가의 예술성과 작가로서의 도덕성을 보여주기 때문입니다. 젊은 작가들에게는 늘 “위험을 감수하라!(Take Risk!)”라고 말하고 싶습니다.

• 김찬동
  위 질문과 관련하여 정부가 정책적으로 강화해야 할 부분이 있다면 어떤 내용일까요?

• 김수자
  그동안 국가가 많은 노력과 지원을 해온 것이 사실이나, 그러나 과연 어떤 형태로 예산이 효율적으로 배분되어야 하는가 하는 문제에 있어서는 아직도 포퓰리즘에 의거한 정책들을 목격합니다. 순수예술은 대중예술과 달리 소수의 탁월한 개인에 의해 이루어집니다. 그 소수의 예술가만이 세계의 폭넓은 관객을 갖고 있다는 것을 기억해야 할 것입니다. 예술지원은 복지지원이 아니며, 정례의 국제적인 안목과 경험, 그리고 미술사적 통찰력이 있는 최고의 전문가, 때로는 작가들에 의해 선정된 작가들이나 큐레이터, 그리고 기관에 아낌없이 주어져야 한다고 생각합니다. 조건 없는 충분한 지원이 아닌 한 단시간에 효과를 기대하기 어렵다고 봅니다. 특히 상업주의의 팽배와 큐레이터들의 역할이 증폭되면서 예술비평이 상대적으로 약화된 국내미술계의 실정을 고려한다면, 많은 토론의 장을 마련하고 세계와 소통하는 비평문화가 형성되길 바랍니다. 이를 위해 많은 비평지나 전문서적을 지원하고 그들의 해외 리서치를 도우며 한국에서도 국제무대에 내세울 수 있는 비평가가 나와야 할 것입니다. 이를 통해 한국작가들의 미술사적 자리매김도 자연스럽게 이루어진다고 봅니다. 그리고 일회성 행사가 아닌, 지속적인 지원으로 아카이브를 축적하는 데에도 의미가 있다고 봅니다. 떠들썩한 잔치가 아닌 차근차근 견고한 한국 미술사의 지층을 쌓아가는 정책이 무엇보다 필요하다고 생각합니다.

• 김찬동
  최근 전 세계적으로 다양한 비엔날레가 개최되어 과거에 비해 비엔날레의 의미와 성격이 많이 달라졌고, 경우에 따라서는 비엔날레가 상업주의와 결탁한 폐해를 드러내기도 하는데 이런 현상에 대해서는 어떻게 생각하십니까?

• 김수자
  원하든 원하지 않든 간에 오늘날 현대미술의 양상은 비엔날레는 물론이고, 큐레이터나 미술관, 작가 역시 거대한 상업주의의 그물망 속에서 존재합니다. 이는 공공기관이나 전문가들이 경제적 자율성을 갖지 못한 데에 기인함과 동시에 할 수 있는 것 이상을 늘 꿈꾸는 작가와 제작자들의 생리에도 기인한다고 봅니다. 그리고 그 틈새에서 알게 모르게 상업주의의 폐해가 발생합니다. 조건 없는 순수한 지원이 아닌 한 그들의 상업행위는 주고받는 이들의 도덕성과도 깊이 연계되어 있습니다. 다만, 상호존중의 태도를 잃지 않는 상호관계 속에서만 불가피한 자본주의적 속성을 인정하고 건강한 관계를 유지할 수 있을 것으로 봅니다. 공식적인 예산만 가지고, 혹은 예산 없이 전시를 한다면 어떤 흥미로운 일들이 발생할지 궁금합니다. 그리고 경제적인 도움을 예상할 수 없는 작가 선정, 조금 복잡한 문제일 테지만, 권력지양적인 비엔날레도 흥미로울 것 같습니다. 다만 상업주의로 점철된 비엔날레는 좀처럼 치열한 프로젝트가 아닌 한 대중의 비난을 받을 수밖에 없고 긴 생명력을 가질 수 없다고 봅니다. 문제는 우후죽순처럼 생겨나는 신생 비엔날레들이 비엔날레 고유의 성격인 현대 미술의 현재를 제시하며 새로운 담론을 생성한다는 목적에서라기보다, 각국의 자치도시들이 그들의 세계 속에서의 자리매김과 관광수입내지 선전효과에 연연한 나머지 확고한 존재의미나 검증 없이 생겨나기 때문에 이러한 문제들이 도출된다고 봅니다.

• 김찬동
  광주비엔날레 등 국내에도 다양한 국제 비엔날레가 있는데, 이러한 행사들이 국제무대에서 그 위상을 명확히 하기 위해서는 어떤 노력이 필요하다고 생각하십니까?

• 김수자
  많은 사람들이 지적하듯이, 우리나라의 비엔날레 숫자는 세계 미술계에 유래가 없고 이 좁은 나라에 가히 폭발일로에 있습니다. 세계미술계의 웃음거리가 되지 않기 위해서는 그동안 타당성을 갖고 성공적으로 세계미술계에서 자리매김한 비엔날레 외에는 다른 명칭 내지는 포맷으로 전시를 하면서 고유의 전시형태와 담론을 만들어 나가야 한다고 봅니다. 하나라도 제대로 된 비엔날레를 자신이나 자신의 지역의 관계여부와 상관없이 넉넉하게 봐주고 또 협조해야 할 것입니다. 결국은 한 비엔날레의 성공이 다른 지역의 작가의 성공에 기여하고 나아가 한국의 위상을 프로페셔널하고 자신 있게 알리는 길이라고 봅니다.

• 김찬동
  비엔날레 참가 계획 이외에 향후 전시나 작품 활동과 관련한 별도의 계획이 있다면 말씀해 주십시오.

• 김수자
  올해 벤쿠버미술관에서의 회고전 형식의 전시가 가장 중요한 전시가 될 것 같습니다. 오랜 기간 상의해 왔고 30년간의 작업을 조망하는 전시로서 작업 전체의 스펙트럼을 보일 수 있는 전시라 특별히 의미를 둡니다. 그 외에 미국 공공시설청(GSA)에서 커미션한 미국과 멕시코 국경선에 설치할 신작 비디오의 영구설치와 유럽과 아시에서의 설치작업들도 논의 중입니다. 진행 중인 ‘실의 궤적’ 시리즈도 늘 스케줄에 포함되어 있으나 올해 진행할 수 있을지 의문입니다. 비엔날레나 테마전들은 작업의 컨텍스트를 확장하고, 나름대로 제 작업을 다각도로 질문해 볼 수 있어 흥미로운 질문이라면 참여할 계획입니다.

• 김찬동
  장시간 인터뷰에 응해 주셔서 감사드리고 전시참가 준비가 순조롭게 진행되기를 바랍니다.

한국관 건축양식에 스며드는 '보따리'

• 김수자 작가는 1990년대 초에 '보따리' 연작을 시작했고 한국 가정에서 일상적으로 사용되는 전통 자수로 장식된 이불보를 국제적인 현대미술의 조형언어로 발전시켰다. 작가는 이불보의 레디메이드 특성보다는 '이미 사용되었었던' 헌 물건이라는 점에 초점을 두고, 그 천들을 사용한 사람들의 무명성과, 육체, 운명 등의 비물질적이고 비가시적인 것에 대한, 즉 삶에 대한 해석의 공감대를 형성하는 데 노력해왔다.

• 작가는 이불보가 사람의 탄생과 죽음, 수면과 사랑, 고통과 꿈 등의 사건들이 발생하는 현장임을 지적했고, 사랑과 복, 행운, 장수, 후손 등의 기원을 상징하는 이불보의 자수 장식을 강조했다. 작가는 이불보에서 인간의 존재를 규정짓는 틀을 가리키는 색인적 기호를 발견했다.
  작가는 또한 이불보가 내포하는 젠더의 역할과 미적 구조에도 초점을 두었다. 이불보는 가정에서의 여성노동, 사회에 가려진 여성의 무보상 업무와 활동을 암시한다. 이불보 상징을 활용하는 작가의 활동은 여성의 사회적, 문화적, 미적 의미를 재정립하는 행위였고, 현대예술사에서 여성의 독특한 맥락을 창조하는 행위였다.

• 올 2013년 베니스비엔날레 한국관에 설치될 '보따리'는 장소특정적인(site-specific) 설치가 될 것이다. 김수자 작가는 유리, 철조, 나무 등의 다양한 건축 자재와 굴곡진 벽면 등의 일반적인 파빌리온 건축양식을 갖춘 한국관을 전시를 위해 변형시키지 않고, 기존의 건축양식을 최대한으로 살리면서 그 구조 자체가 작가의 특징적인 개념인 '보따리'의 연장선으로 기능하도록 프로젝트를 구상한다.
  소리, 빛, 색채 등 인간의 오감을 자극하는 감성적인 요소들을 사용하여 관객이 전시공간을 '몸'으로 체험할 수 있게끔 하는 체험 중점적인(experiential) 전시가 될 것이다. 그러나 전시는 동시에 상징체계의 역할도 수행할 것이다. 왜냐하면, 작가가 바깥 자연을 실내공간 안으로 끌고 들어와 밖을 안에서 보는 상황을 창조하여 안과 밖의 경계선을 넘나들 뿐만 아니라, 전시공간 자체를 자족적인 자연으로 전환시켜 인간의식의 소우주를 재구성하려는 계획을 세우고 있기 때문이다.

• 잡동사니를 이동하려는 의도를 충족시키는 수단이라기보다는 그 잡동사니를 묶는 목적을 충당하는 보따리의 기능에서 김 작가는 변화무쌍한 인간역사, 다양한 요소로 구성된 세계, 혹은 다면적이고 다층적인 한 개인의 정체성과 삶을 하나로 묶는 틀의 개념을 발견한다.

우주와 삶의 총체성, 그리고 보편성의 함유

• 김수자의 보따리는 하나로 결합된 우주를 상징한다. 여기서 우주는 인간의 의식세계를 의미한다. 보따리는 삶의 총체성을 상징하는 도구로 사용되고, 삶을 총체성의 관점에서 해석할 수 있는 수단으로 활용된다.

• 그 보따리 상징의 의도는 '하나로 된 우주'라는 개념을 소통, 혹은 타인에게 전달하려는 것이다. 반면 그 보따리 상징의 목적은 '하나로 된 우주'라는 개념을 재현하는 데 있다. 이 점에서, 즉 이동수단으로 지각되는 보따리가 자족적인 우주공간의 상징으로 전환된다는 점에서 김수자의 창조성과 예술성이 두드러진다. 김 작가의 과거 작업들을 살펴보면, 우주의 총체성을 의미하는 '보따리' 개념의 확장은 전통 한국가정에서 일상적으로 사용되는 보따리를 전시장으로 옮겨 놓아 첫째, 그 일상적 맥락의 해체를 통해, 그리고 둘째, 시각예술이란 새로운 맥락과의 결합을 통해 성공적으로 이루어진다.
  김수자 작가는 지난 30여 년 동안 전체성과 보편성을 토론하는 작업을 일관성 있게 추구해 왔다. 삶의 총체적인 틀을 논하는 '보따리'도 그렇고, 천조각들을 꿰매어 하나로 연결 짓는 바늘의 의미를 논하는 '바늘 여인'도 마찬가지이다. 그의 작업이 제시하는 전체성과 보편성은 관객에 의해 특수하게 분석되어야 한다.

• 마시밀리아노 지오니가 기획하는 올해 베니스비엔날레 미술전의 주제는 인간역사에서 나타난 모든 창조물을 수집하고자하는, 실행 불가능한 인간의 집착적인 의지를 표현하는 '백과사전적 궁전'이다. 우주의 총체성과 보편성을 논하는 김수자의 '보따리' 개념은 비엔날레의 전체적인 주제개념에 딱 맞아떨어지는 안성맞춤이다. 따라서 올해 한국관의 김수자 <보따리>전은 맥락특정적인(context-specific) 전시가 될 것이다.

• 나아가 올해 한국관 전시는 절묘하게 시기적절한(time-specific) 행사가 될 것이다. 김 작가는 뉴욕에서 허리케인 샌디를 경험했다. 전기와 가스, 그리고 온수가 없이 일주일간을 고통스럽게 산 작가는 많은 생각을 하는 시간을 갖게 되었고, 그 경험을 바탕으로 세계 도처에서 갈수록 빈번하게 발생하는 천재지변을 토론하는 새 작업을 이번 한국관 전시를 통해서 발표할 예정이다. 따라서 자연재해 문제를 다루는 환경의식(environment-conscious)적인 작업이 예상된다.

• 이렇게 한국의 가정문화, 베니스비엔날레 미술전, 한국관의 건축 특징, 작가 개인의 경험, 관객의 감수성 등 다층적이고 다면적인 요소들을 꿰어 하나의 네트워크로 결합시키는 김수자의 2013년 베니스비엔날레 한국관 '보따리' 설치는 이 국제전에서 보기 드문 보석 같은 전시가 될 것으로 기대된다

• This year's Venice Biennale's subject, the 'Encyclopedic Palace', is conceived by Biennale director Massimiliano Gioni after M. Auriti's 'Il Enciclopedico Palazzo del Mondo' in the 1950s. Auriti's model built on a 1:200 scale, welcomes guests at the central Pavilion of Giardini. The original 136 floor skyscraper-to-be would have occupied a vast area in Washington DC and would have played host to an international knowledge database from all times.

• In a similar fashion to Auriti, Kippenberger's utopic 'Metro-Net World Connection' series (1993-7) envisaging a vast network of tube lines connecting the entire world, materialised with the production of only but a few real-life metro-like entrances (such as the one on the Greek island of Syros). His work was posthumously exhibited at the German Pavilion of the 50th Biennale in 2003 and although it did not become the subject of the entire Biennale back then, the profound romanticism, idealisation and conceptualisation of both arcadian cases inspired artists and philosophers on a grand scale.

• This year's 88 national participations scattered at the Arsenale, Giardini and various other sites as well as other independent exhibitions around Venice, have tailor made their shows to fit and survey this year's theme.

• How can art evolve and expand along the lines of "what could knowledge be or become"? The answer derives from the spectrum of what the modern world may accept as valuable piece of information; consequently, that is knowledge-worth extracting and distilling from today's reality. Needless to catalogue the valuable portion of data from the non-valuable, perhaps it all deserves to fall into the 'universal' category of encyclopedic knowledge. This would include pretty much everything in the Platonic and Aristotelian domain.

• For the art enthusiast and critic, the national pavilion behaviourism is always an interesting factor. The perception and acuity of knowledge filtered through national identity and social layering proves to be rather pronounced in this year's Biennale. While several national participations seem to establish their artistic locus via certain political and socio-economic routes, probably in the hope that their chosen narrative will create international awareness, some others free themselves from analogous needs and effectively represent an artistic oeuvre and calibre worth revisiting and investigating further.

• The unique environment of the Korean Pavilion, 'To Breathe: Bottari' (curated by Seungduk Kim), encapsulates both the long artistic tradition of its creator Kimsooja and diverse elements of Korean culture. The transformation of the entire pavilion space into a bubble-like enclosure allows light and sound to dominate throughout, instantly activating the viewer's senses. We are invited to experience the given domain and increasingly become part of it. But by entering a small dark anechoic chamber and remaining there in a state of blandness for just one minute the visitor is vulgarly amputated from their senses. Kimsooja's exploration of senses via the stern process of 'total voidance' created by introducing this black hole reaches (via manipulating our living environment) a state of realisation and, therefore, total appreciation of our current known situation. By actively involving the viewer with this experience, the artist succeeds in producing an ongoing mass performance thus generating a living intervention.

• Konrad Smolen愀ki of the Polish Pavilion works along the same lines of understanding our senses in a natural and non-natural, controlled environment. His installation, 'Everything Was Forever, Until it Was No More' (curated by Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera), encompasses the assessment of sound produced by a traditional instrument (two bronze handmade ecclesiastical bells), its reproduction by loudspeakers and its processing with a special technique that re-transmits a delayed, altered resounding sound wave. Smolen愀ki's lengthy research on the properties of sound and time has not only achieved to de-characterise and separate a source from its very own physical sound but also to free and re-baptise the latter with a brand new hypostasis. The 'newly born' abstract sound echoing forcefully among the pavilion walls voids the original pre-sound minimalistic locus and introduces a surreal time lapse domain. I personally found extremely intriguing how eager visitors were to investigate the soundless space before the activation of the two bells, and how keen they were to abandon it shortly after the production of the reverberating noise despite the earplugs provided. This intense discomfort may be explained as the natural result of the process of deconstruction of senses through deanalysing and decoding noise against time. It all proves how complex it can be to re-register in our collective unconscious a modified detail in one of our senses. Coincidentally enough, the artist has been recently asked by the Biennale organisers to pause the installation until further notice.

• Outside the borders of Biennale proper, the Azerbaijan Pavilion situated at Campo San Stefano presents a group exhibition of six young artists focusing on aspects of cultural existence, ethnic distinctiveness and social discourse. 'Ornamentation', the title of Azerbaijan's show (curated by Hervé Mikaeloff), is an amalgamation of decorative arts, religion and tradition infused with contemporary vision. Rashad Alakbarov's installations, 'Intersection' and 'Miniature', are assemblages of random objects made of wood or metal organised in -what appears to be- unsystematic fashion. Only when a projector light hits the mass of objects we witness the hidden imagery forming on the opposite wall. Although sharing a very similar technique with other highly acclaimed artists such as Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Alakbarov's chosen shadow iconography is profound; from the traditional shebeke designs and patterns to a human reclining figure and an optical illusion that reveals its message only when you use a camera.

• "It is not chaos" appears through the camera lens pointing out to the [semi]obvious oxymoron, that the actual appearance of things can only be subjective, the mass of knowledge generated from the conscious world can only be interpreted through the de-construction and re-construction of its individual components.

• Auriti's vision can only depart from its limbo by praising the value of senses. This year's Biennale has had several strong participants, whose artistic oeuvre and exploration have gone a step further and, undoubtedly, increased our expectations in the fields of research, technological development and medium advancement, and in absolute synchronicity with the latest psychoanalytic, philosophical and scientific impetus.

• Franck Gautherot
  In 2005 Seungduk Kim, your present commissioner for the Pavilion, invited you to participate in a Korean group show she curated at the Vienna Kunsthalle. You didn't agree to take part in such an exhibition. What led you to accept her invitation for Venice? How do you feel about this national identity when you have been a 'self-exiled' artist for so long?

• Kimsooja
  I think 'national exhibition' refers to so many different categories and connotations. For an artist who considers herself a 'self-exile' and a cosmopolitan, the notion of a 'nation', or 'national' is not that simple. The particular concept of the nation or national has to be defined before one can address its criteria. The historical, political, economic and cultural specificities of a society and a nation have a lot to do with an artist in terms of her/his personal and collective identity. These factors define how an artist has built up her/his own perceptions of the world and artistic criteria within the international art scene. A nation is like ones' parents by whom you were raised and who have influenced your life with given conditions and perceptions. When it comes to a collective identity, an artist who pursues his or her own unique and individual vocabularies must have their own point of view as to what category they fit into within a specific group show, or an exhibition as a national representative.
  Over the years I had to decline a number of national group shows including biennales that weren't in line with my personal artistic practice and my beliefs. For example, I declined to participate in a national group exhibition which was an exchange between Korea and China in Beijing a couple of years ago. That decision was a reaction against the constant violence inflicted on an artist Ai Wei Wei by his government. I have no personal relationship with Ai Wei Wei, but I don't believe that a government can deprive an artist of their freedom of expression and perform violent actions towards them regardless of who they are. The decision I made not to participate in this exhibition had nothing to do with the curator, organizer or invited artists and their artistic values but was solely a humanitarian and ethical action; in the attitude of taking a position as an outsider.
  My reaction to the Korean Exhibition at the Kunsthalle Vienna was also an action to declare my position as an outsider. That was still a time when I was questioning "Koreanness". As far as I know, the show examined and juxtaposed two opposite poles in Korean art: the Modern Art group and the Minjung Art group. These two groups were usually not curated together, because they had a certain kind of political conflict between each other and also due to their respective interests in Korean society. As an artist who had tried to keep a distance from any group activities or any hierarchical structures in Korean society, I didn't want to return to that particular political context in a national exhibition such as this, as it was something that I had consciously avoided for much of my career. I have worked hard to retain my autonomy and independence as an artist, although it has not been an easy path for me over the years. Besides which, I had already been introduced to the audiences in Kunsthalle Vienna during a solo show just a few years before and an international group show in Vienna Seccession in the past. It is more to do with my own personal history and position rather than with the show itself. When I saw the catalogue, I thought the show looked quite interesting as a spectator.
  I guess being invited to represent my own country's national pavilion is the most exceptional recognition I can achieve as an artist who considers herself in self-exile. Without a doubt, it is an honor and it is a challenging question for me to work on this particular biennale, so I was willing to develop the best possible project for the Korean Pavilion.

• Franck Gautherot
  Seungduk Kim expressed, from the beginning, her wish to focus on the pavilion as an architecturally strong component that the artist will have to play with. How did you take her invitation to mainly connect to this given architectural situation?

• Kimsooja
  I understand how much the nature of the particular architectural elements of the Korean Pavilion has raised questions for the commissioners and invited artists in the past, and we are no exception. However, I value Seungduk Kim's approach to the pavilion, as it has never been examined from a solely architectural perspective. This certainly coincided with my immaterial way of approaching the site specific project and I tried to preserve the original structure of the pavilion while challenging its specific qualities and problems.

• Leaving the whole space empty without installing any objects in it, the installation expands the void to the maximum by taking the architecture of the Korean Pavilion itself as a Bottari (Korean word for bundle). I tried to transform the entire pavilion into 'A Bottari of Light and Sound, Darkness and Soundlessness' that inhales and exhales; as if the architecture itself were my body. I have chosen not to install any objects in the space so that the audience's body may be embraced by the sound of my breathing. The Weaving Factory (2004-2013) sound performance fills the pavilion and proposes a unified experience, together with the yang energy which enters as sunlight, and extending all the way to the yin energy of the black hole in the anechoic chamber.

• The skin of the glass windows is wrapped with the diffraction grating film fabric that defuses the sunlight into a rainbow color spectrum. What we see is the unfolded sunlight and the shadows of nature that shower into the pavilion and are translated into a color spectrum. This light and shadow reflects onto the white walls and simultaneously bounces endlessly back and forth from the mirrored skin of the ceiling and the floor; folding and unfolding into infinity. The darkness in light and the light in darkness is stretched to an extreme into waves of light and sound. The audience's body resides within mine as a whole, wrapping and unwrapping, communicating with each other. The light waves and the sound waves together with my humming and the inhaling and exhaling of my own breath, question the moment of life and death while the mirrors bounce light off their surfaces breathing in and out.

• It was significant that Hurricane Sandy happened in New York right at the moment when we were discussing this project. The experience of living without power, electricity, heat and conveniences for one week with the whole community, was a humbling and contemplative moment. At the same time, this special moment gave me an insight into the Korean pavilion project by encouraging me to construct an anechoic chamber to explore a state of complete darkness and soundlessness. In this way, the visual knowledge of infinite reflection in the main space—which is constructed from purely natural light, finds a counterpoint in the space of the 'unknown' or 'unseen' in the anechoic chamber.

• Franck Gautherot
  In general how do you picture your contribution to any exhibition situation: Is it the space that calls first? The people? The context? The location and its history?

• Kimsooja
  I am aware of all the factors and consider them all simultaneously. The artist's job is done by an omnipresent gaze and mind that looks at both the visible and the invisible.

• Franck Gautherot
  You have been invited many times to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. So the biennale is no longer an issue for you, but the Korean Pavilion is a new challenge. How do you locate yourself within its specific history? You said you have seen many of the shows there over the years.

• Kimsooja
  I have been invited to participate in the main Venice Biennale exhibition twice. The first time for Harald Szeemann's d'APERTutto (1999), and the second time for Rosa Martinez's exhibition Always a little further (2005), both were shown in the Arsenale. I have also participated in other official exhibitions at the biennale such as the Tiger's Tail (1995) curated by Soyeon Ahn and organized by The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, in the Palazzo Vendramin. Nam June Paik had been at the German pavilion in 1993; this was the following biennale for which he contributed to present large scale Korean Contemporary Art in Venice. It was the first time I had presented my installation with bottaris in Venice. I also participated in Markers (2001) curated by Ryszard Waskow on Garibaldi Street; and ArtTempo (2007) at the Palazzo Fortuni organized by Axel Vervorrdt, and curated by Jean-Hubert Martin and Matijs Visser. This exhibition became an inspiration for many curators to create a historical return of the Gutai group through exhibitions such as the show Daniel Birnbaum invited Matijs Visser to curate at the following Venice biennale. They are now introduced everywhere around the world.
  Most of the biennale projects were marvelous experiences for me, especially when my work was in a context that opens a new dimensionality, was re-contextualized, or when I could create a meaningful new piece that opens up new possibilities. Many of the Biennales I participated in served these kinds of opportunities, and each time I have also been able to see the Korean Pavilion and its projects and other pavilions. This certainly helped me to understand what was going on in the world at that time. It also helped me to form an approach to the Korean Pavilion and an understanding of what position the Korean pavilion has on the contemporary art map, along with its relationship with other pavilions. Therefore, this provided me with some insight as to how to approach the Korean pavilion project and the practicality of dealing with specific local conditions. Most of the biennales I have participated in have given me opportunities to create new commissioned works with challenging themes and audiences. However, I am always interested in challenging new projects that I am inspired by—whether it is a biennale that gets more attention, or a small, remote local project—as long as there exists the possibility to realize work and develop from it.
  This project was inspired not only by Seungduk Kim's approach to the architecture, which assured me the chance to pursue the site-specificity, but also by contemplating Massimiliano Gioni 's title Encyclopidia di Palazzo. For me, this title immediately connects with my thoughts on the notion of bottari and Gioni's reference reiterated a certain common knowledge which is in line with the evolution of my practice. National Pavilions don't always correspond directly to the biennale's main theme, but rather present their artists' own theme independently. However, even if I am not invited to participate in certain projects, I always take curatorial positions as my question and contemplate how I would answer. So I have a number of unrealized projects that are related to projects I was not invited to, but which I considered from my artistic position. Without exception, each time I come to the biennale as a visitor or as an exhibitor, I have examined the Korean Pavilion, asking myself "How could I answer if I were using this space or this theme?" You know, it has already been almost twenty years since I saw the opening of the Korean Pavilion.

• Franck Gautherot
  You have been quite familiar with biennales around the world. What stays with you after all these participations? In your work? What are your ideas about biennales and why did you kindly agree to be part of this one?

• Kimsooja
  I must say that many of my projects were developed not only by my own thoughts, but also by interesting themes and questions that have been posed by each of the national or international curators with whom I have worked. Biennales have been one of the exhibition frames that has enabled me to realize a number of my important new projects, as they present a supportive model for new work—rather than showing existing works—either by posing inspiring questions or offering specific spaces and challenging ideas to contemplate. I value all these opportunities for developing new projects and expanding or contextualizing my ideas and practices in new ways. I am always interested in trying to find the best answer I can deliver through my perspective in response to the current aesthetic, philosophical, psychological or political questions posed by curators through their exhibitions, and also in response to the work of writers. Although biennales are often tough, most biennales I have participated in have examined broad and specific current issues of this era, and obviously they fulfill an important role as agents for re-contextualizing contemporary art history. The fabric of my practice and my approach in general has threads that relate directly and indirectly to many current issues in life and art. In fact, any theme can be discussed with my approach towards the 'totality in life and art'.

• For three consecutive biennales, I turned down kind invitations to participate. My decision to decline the invitations had nothing to do with the curatorship, or any other matter, it was purely because I couldn't accept the title of the biennale, which I felt was no longer relevant in this era. As I defined my position, I also couldn't participate in subsequent editions, even if a good friend of mine was inviting me and the show was nothing to do with the problem I found in that biennale's title. I don't serve the biennale itself but instead I participate as a communicator for those whose question is valuable—to find my own answer and experiment with it. I must say, most biennales served my practice so well by opening up my artistic paths and giving me opportunities that I hadn't had before.

• I am skeptical about the current boom of biennales around the world and their political power structures. Sometimes it seems more like manufacturing an industry in order to promote a city as an international destination through a focus on the tourism and economic benefits of staging a biennale. I don't blame cities for this, but I do think sometimes there is a lack of awareness and reflection on the origin of the art biennale model as a structure to examine the cutting edge of contemporary art. Maybe that is also a current symptom that we face in this era that reveals the reality of the commercially driven art world.

• Franck Gautherot
  Concerning your project, I am very impressed by your precise way of following the 'brief' to propose, within this framework, a very original environmental creation filling the entire space. How did you come to this solution?

• Kimsooja
  My practice has been increasingly dematerializing since the early days until now. My ultimate goal as an artist is to be liberated from materiality, including my body. To become self-sufficient and freed from desire—for me—is the highest achievement in my art. I wish to be liberated from doing art or making art by extinguishing my artistic energy to the limit. This cannot be achieved by simply stopping the act of making art—paradoxically, it can only be achieved by doing art, living fully, in the most profound and poignant way.

• Since I created To Breathe: A Mirror Woman (2006) at the Crystal Palace in Madrid (curated by Oliva Maria Rubio and commissioned by the Reina Sofia Museum), I reached the point where I could contextualize three decades of my sewing practice process in the most immaterial and conceptual manner. The notion of sewing and that of wrapping and unwrapping in this context, defines the identity of a bottari in the most open and immaterial manner. By emptying the whole space and filling the void only with my breathing, I can address the whole architectural structure as a bottari of light and sound.
  The experience of the Crystal Palace installation helped me to envisage the transformation of the Korean Pavilion into a bottari of light and sound. What differentiates this installation from the Cyrstal Palace installation is the addition of the added element of 'parallel mirror surfaces'. That is; the installation of mirrors on the ceiling as well as the floor, which expands the visual void into infinity. This addition opens up the entire space into an infinite rainbow spectrum—a 'breathing pavilion'. The complete darkness of the anechoic chamber is another important component that I have never examined in conjunction with the parameters of light and sound.

• I hope that all of these elements of immateriality will together create a sensational physical and audio-visual experience for the audiences.

• Franck Gautherot
  Seungduk Kim in her text points out something rather new in the comment and analysis of your work: the centripetal nature and forces at work in the pavilion. Are you aware of this idea?

• Kimsooja
  I think the word 'centripetal' serves very well to define the formal and mental structure of my perspective in time and space. Since the beginning of my awareness and art practice, I've been investigating the origins of the cruciform structure in analyzing tableaux, daily objects, physical, psychological human activities and body, and the natural phenomena in its relationship to the cosmic world. During the whole course of my experimentation since the late 1970s, I've been digging into the core structure, even before sewing and wrapping or performing. My piercing gaze and focus naturally transmits into a spiral force. This force has also been embodied in the 'standing still' performance in A Needle Woman (1999-2009) where the stillness of my body functions as an axis of time and space. Standing still can represent the inner turmoil of chaos, speed, the scream and also rebirth.

• "The proper place of the inner life is defined solely by the failure to establish any satisfactory relationship with external reality." - Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, 1957

• What has not yet occurred cannot be described, of course... even though we have all the information imaginable on materials, the construction plans, and the display. We experimented with every aspect separately in a highly visual manner: checking samples of aluminium mirror panel for the floor and ceiling; sticking portions of diffraction grating film on the windows of the pavilion on a cold November day; testing the sound-absorbing foam for the anechoic dark room; spending hours on Chinese websites to find ideas for the "by-products": bags, socks, USB keys; going to Dongdaemum night market in Seoul to look for bojagi fabric. In fact if we had already done similar things for previous shows, this time was rather special since all the elements were mass-produced and the entire display is handled by a local construction team. Nothing directly implies an artwork, but there is a huge volume of material for an intangible installation.

• Paradoxes are common in art, but in Kimsooja's case, it comes close to the wire. Which is exactly what makes it exciting, and challenging. Nothing can be gauged in advance, it has to be completed to be delivered and experienced properly. No model, no CGI can offer the final vision... For the artist, it is a method and a life-long involvement, but for the curator there is a certain amount of suspended action. Slowly we will perceive the strengths and effects of the materials, patiently we will figure out the reflections on the ceiling and on the floor, gradually we will begin to fathom the sounds absorbed by layers of thick and heavy rockwool, plasterboard, rubber coatings and sharp foam pyramids. Virtuality will be at play all through the weeks of April and May until the last touch is added by the sound installation. The voice of the artist will imbue the whole environment with organic bodily breathing.

• In order to work within Sukchul Kim's architecture for the Pavilion with no structural modifications, additions or alterations [1], Kimsooja decided that the metal skeleton of the pavilion would receive several skins to shape it into a consistent body: diffraction grating films will cover the glass windows (walls and roof); aluminium mirror panels will be stuck on the floor and fixed to the ceiling; the artist's voice will wrap the main space; an anechoic chamber will occupy the brick pavilion on the South side. The volume of the space will thus be opened out; the skins provide the mutation of the initial transparent cage-like space into a translucent web of light diffracted into rainbow colours, which speed up through an infinity of reflections. Humming and breathing will fill the space with kaleidoscopic volume. A dark anechoic chamber will bury the coloured experience deep inside the visitor's body. Kimsooja's project for the Biennale, To Breathe: Bottari, is original and perfectly fitting within her body of work.

Breathing

• Bringing nurturing air into our lungs, exhaling impoverished air, in a constant balanced movement. Our body is run by capturing the fuel for life. Bringing it in and sending it out. It takes the best and rejects the weakened part of the gas.

Diffracting / Reflecting

• Light will be driven around from surface to surface and it will already be multiple in its diffracted state. Will it be rainbow-like and packed with art historical reminiscences? An infinity mirror à-la-Kusama? A kaleidoscope on an adult scale? Architecture as an engine to provide a kind of light therapy? Viewers are included by definition. If no one is there, then there is nothing! The traditional Korean use of bright colours, plain colours, primary colours is at work everywhere in everyday life, in the past and still now. Red, yellow, blue, white and black, these five colours – or Obangsaek – were considered to be closely related to the five cardinal directions. In Korean, Obang means "five directions" and saek means "colour". Obang consists of north, south, east, west, and the centre of these cardinal points. Each direction has its own colour. North is associated with the colour black. Black stands for winter, water, kidneys, a salty taste, sorrow and knowledge. The colour for south is red. Red means summer, fire, the heart, bitterness, pleasure and propriety. East was assigned the colour blue. Blue represents spring, trees, the liver, sourness, delight and benevolence. West was associated with the colour white. White signifies fall, gold, lungs, pungency, anger and righteousness. Lastly, the centre was attributed the colour yellow. Yellow denotes the spleen, soil, sweetness, greed and wisdom. Beyond such symbolism, these colours (found in fabrics for bedcovers and cushions among other uses) equally strongly address those whose background has been bathed in the utopia of the De Stijl patterns: primary colours in geometric patterns and order. The ghosts of Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg are alive in Korea. Naturally Kimsooja has dealt, and keeps dealing, with these traditional and modernist issues of colour. It helps when tradition, which is often a burden of authoritarian limitations, is aligned with avant-garde references.

Bottari

• In Kimsooja's work, Bottari reads as seminal, motherly, warm, storytelling, formalist, matrix-like, basic, vintage & kitsch, cheap & precious, flexible, endless. Bottari is the result of rolling up pieces of fabric in bundles. A package, a wrapped object. Though they may consist of several pieces of fabric rolled up together in a tautological bag. In the 1990s, Deductive Objects were shown in different locations and particularly in New York at PS1 during a residency programme in 1992-1993. Some works bear the diffused influence of the Paris time while others found their way out and captured the cultural and artistic specificity of the New World. There is one piece (see pp. 117, 132) that can be seen as a turning point for her work – away from the sculptural objects or bidimensional canvas-like pieces, towards site specific environments: it took up an entire wall for a discreet and precise installation of small torn pieces of multicoloured fabric inserted in tiny holes between the bricks of the wall. This piece reminds me of a sacred place. There are traditions in different religions – jewish or buddhist– to use written words as support for prayers or meditation: placing slips of paper containing written prayers in the crevices of the Wall in Jerusalem is much publicised or hanging Lokta paper prayer flag garlands on trees in Tibet. In this instance, slips of fabric replaced the paper, and colours instead of written prayers. As such, the piece deals with memory's narratives and secrets.

Transparency and Obstruction

• Kimsooja's work could also perhaps be qualified as acts of unveiling and disclosing: slips of papers are left behind, a corpus of secrets is wrapped in bundles, she is seen from the back in the video works. Kimsooja does not willingly participate in the transparency of the present world, where everything is supposed to be accessible, revealed, only to be forgotten a moment later. She is keeping layers of narratives deep within the knotted fabric. If she does not show her face in the videos, it means that we will never see the way she looks at the crowds of human beings in the noisy streets of the cities of the world. She stands as an obstacle in the flow, like in Etienne-Jules Marey's poetic science experiences – such as the mechanics of fluids visualised by using a square object (obstacle). Does Kimsooja mean to study how much an obstacle – here a still and quiet standing woman – may slow down the pace of humanity on the move? What will such a woman in grey outfits cause to the movement of a crowd? Often she stays invisible and does not produce any slow down. Swiss professor of French Literature and Historian of Ideas, Jean Starobinski, analysed the constant unbalanced position in the case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau between his sincere desire for "transparency" and his frustration that created "obstruction" and led him to passive resignation.

• Contradiction in form usually creates unsolved situations. In Kimsooja's works, paradox is an engine, a tool for building shelters and places for relief. Neither an "art aid", nor a comfort spot for exhausted art travellers, her places are energy batteries. Transparency is not invisibility. But rather, turning transparent is the ultimate dream of the voyeur: nothing is kept secret, everything is visible, accessible to desire. Architecture in modern times has fought for this since glass could be mass produced in large sizes and reinforced to resist [2]. The combination of clarity (glass) and blurring via a colourgenerating device is one step further than stained-glass in churches, where light comes through coloured glass windows and projects onto the stone paving in a complex palette of colour tones [3].

• For the 2013 Korean Pavilion, with a formal strategy of non-doing, Kimsooja will allow the random good fortune of the changing lights to shape and reshape the whole building. The composition will not be controlled, leaving chance and mischance to create the coloured ambiance. Mirrors on the floor and ceiling will multiply to infinity the reflected coloured lights contained inside the pavilion showering the visitors with jets of diffracted violet, blue, green, yellow, orange and red pure light colours.

Centripetal Acceleration

• The proposed environment will function as a centripetal engine, an unplugged energy plant absorbing energies of any kind like the ever-changing daylight and the empathy left behind by the viewer. Every single component and effect will be sucked up by the centre, by the nucleus. The Korean Pavilion will be turned into a large scale experiential generator.

• The additional room could be described either as the total opposite or as the end result of chromatic light experiences. This anechoic chamber is a darkened space designed to completely absorb the reflections of sound waves and be insulated from exterior sources of noise. It is designed to accommodate just a few people at a time who are prepared to lose their sense of auditory stability and dwell in their own heartbeat or the turmoil of their blood circulation. To complete the Korean Pavilion visit as if attracted and absorbed into a black hole.

• Somehow this could be envisaged as a summary of a number of Kimsooja's previous works in which the elements of the composition have been captured, absorbed, wrapped. We have decided to take the visitors to a region of space from which nothing can escape, neither light, nor sound. A perfect hijacking. For the greater good.