Kimsooja, of a slightly earlier generation than Suh, also had transformative experiences during her international residencies and exhibition work. Kim had studied painting at Hongik University in 1983 before she went to the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris in 1985. She then attended the visiting artists' studio programme at PS1 in Long Island, New York in 1992, and presented her Deductive Object in the following year.(1993) From the 1980s, the artist has incorporated sewing in her work, utilizing many different textiles: 'satins, linens, colour-striped silks and fine silk gossamers'.[1] The needle, in Kimsooja's projects, is a metaphor for travel, and the act of stitching, through fissure and suture, connects points and places of 'identity, mobility, borderlessness, and nomadism'.[2] Over time, her work began to incorporate her body as a performative index, becoming a signal, anchor and signifier of the duration of time spent in various locations. Earlier performance work in 1981 had involved the register of the horizontal and the vertical through the body in Structure: A Study on Body, a series of silkscreen photographs that record her performance.[3]

In the early 1990s Kimsooja participated in an important international travelling exhibition 'Cities on the Move', curated by Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist, that opened at the Secession in Vienna in 1997. The exhibition dealt with the rapidly changing East and Southeast Asian metropolis over the late twentieth century and displayed diverse artistic mediums like painting, sculpture, film, video, performance, installation and architecture. As well as Kimsooja, the show included work by fellow Korean artists Choi Jeong-hwa, Choi Wook, Kim Jinai, Koo Jeonga and Lee Bul, and by Korean architects Min Sohnjoo and Seung Hyosang (also known as Seung H-Sang)." True to its name, the exhibition travelled to many different cities in Asia and Europe, and a version of it was shown in New York at PS1 in 1998-9.

In conjunction with the show, Kimsooja produced her own mobile work, Cities on the Move-2727 KM Bottari Truck (1997), which travelled around various cities in Korea, and was shown at the São Paulo Biennale in 1998 and the Venice Biennale in 1999. While bottari in Korean means 'bundles' or 'the wrapping of personal belongings', the word also connotes a 'departure' (in the act of packing or wrapping 'bottari') and is traditionally associated with female domestic labour and a generational collectivity, passing from grandmother to mother to child. The sense of departure embedded in bottari refers both to Kim's own past – her father was a military employee who was posted to various locations over the course of her childhood - and also to her own voluntary migration around the globe. For eleven days and over 2,727 kilometres, the artist rode in the back of a blue truck surrounded by fabric bundles of bottari. Her motionless back was captured in photographs by the well-known Korean photographer Ju Myung Duk, and an accompanying video features a constantly shifting landscape that frames Kimsooja's dark silhouette and the colourful patchwork of bottari. The packing of bottari means that one is leaving or moving, choosing a new, unpredictable and possibly precarious state. In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist in 1997, Kimsooja described the truck in terms of its association with 'homelessness, refugees or immigrants of any sort'.

In other works, such as A Needle Woman (1999-2001), which was shown at PS1 in 2001, the performative dimension of the artist's body becomes more prominent. In this video installation, filmed in Shanghai, Tokyo, New York and New Delhi, Kimsooja's body is like a stone in a river of people flooding a busy street, a bustling marketplace and a pedestrian thoroughfare. The artist, though once again only visible from the back, is a figure set apart, surrounded by crowds of people who come in contact with, and flow past, her body. When asked about the motivation for this work, Kimsooja replied:

"After this two-hour period, when I arrived at a street in Shibuya, where hundreds of thousands of people were constantly passing, like waves of a human ocean ebbing and flowing - I suddenly became aware of the meaning of my 'walking'. It was a breathtaking moment. I had to stop on the spot and stand still - creating a contradictory position against the flow of the pedestrians, like a needle or an axis, observing and contemplating them coming and going, weaving through and against my body as a medium, like a symbolic needle."

Weaving together sensations of different cities increasingly altered by global- ization, Kimsooja's body acts as a temporal anchor point for the line of sight, stitching together varied cultural and social circumstances in what David Harvey has described as 'a time-space compression that has had a disorienting and disruptive impact'.

Kimsooja's contemporary, Minjung Kim (b. 1962), also weaves a theme of nomadism through her work. Best known for her abstract, calligraphic and monochrome pictorial idioms, Minjung Kim works with colours and references that often derive from Korean tradition, a practice she began after she moved from Korea to Italy in the 1990s.29 Kim uses traditional Korean paper called hanji, often burning the edges of the paper with an incense stick, a practice that she began in the late 1990s in Milan. This repetitive practice has a performative dimension that stems from the artist's diasporic existence and psychological dislocation from her family and home country. By burning the edges of the hanji over many hours, Kim creates a layered, textured surface that leads to visible physical tensions and faultlines, as seen in The Room (2017; fig. 13). In her ink-based abstract paintings, the ink settles into saturated stains that merge into dark lines and flat areas. In reference to these, the artist has said that 'boundaries' and 'lines' represent an essential part of the human condition, creating a space where people collect and find security and psychological comfort. At the same time, Kim's lines invade, intermingle and smudge, reflecting the divisions that embody the artist's own complex identification with the local, collective history and marginalized identity of her hometown of Gwangju. The painter evokes her own dislocations through the work of cutting, accumulating, layering and burning.