When Kimsooja first visited Wanås Konst, it didn’t take long before she said, ‘I want to cultivate plants, the line of thought makes sense on site.’ The foundation and the sculpture park are located on the site of an organic farm. Very soon, Kimsooja set her mind on flax, and as part of the exhibition, two varieties of flax were planted – plants to generate linseed oil and linen fibre. As well as being a physical source of painting materials, the field became a fluid tableau, described by Kimsooja as woven into the earth. Sown at the end of April, it grew in spring and flowered in the summer. From August it was harvested and the steps of turning plants into natural fibres took place continuously thereafter. Finally, the fibre was spun into yarn and the yarn was woven into a canvas. The oil seed flax was harvested in September, the seeds were pressed and the final stage was mixing the oil with pigment. Bringing together the whole cycle of life and art, this project expands the notion of painting and textile production that have characterised Kimsooja’s entire oeuvre, and her own cycle as an artist.

Elisabeth Millqvist
Painting materials and your continuous investigations in textile are central in the
exhibition Sowing into Painting. You’re an artist who stopped painting; instead, you have spoken about the fabric of life becoming the canvas and the needle the brush, but eventually you also stopped sewing!

Kimsooja
[laughter]
I stopped many things in the process.

Elisabeth Millqvist
You then connected things without sewing – not painting, not sewing. I see a parallel to the performance A Needle Woman; in the performance video the focus is what you do not do.

Kimsooja
Rather than thinking of myself ‘performing’, I think of myself as simply ‘being’, and more specifically, ‘being there’.

A Needle Woman is, in a way, my statement against performing something.

Elisabeth Millqvist
What you do, though, is stand, sit and lie down. You often speak of daily life activities as material. I want to ask about these everyday movements; do you feel a relationship with what American dancers did in the 1960s, such as Trisha Brown walking up a building, or Simone Forti twisting a rope?

Kimsooja
I wasn’t aware of them at that time. In Korea, we didn’t have much information about international contemporary art. It was only after the 1988 Seoul Olympics that such information became more readily available. Koreans weren’t even allowed to freely travel abroad until the 1980s. My focus and awareness were on daily life and acts. I wanted to contextualise these acts within contemporary art, painting, sculpture, installation and performance. In the mid-1980s and into the 1990s, I observed and focused on women’s domestic activities such as sewing, doing laundry, cooking, cleaning, shopping or decorating the house.

All these activities were interrogated. My questions as a painter centred on the woven nature of the canvas surface. It was a groundbreaking moment for me when I touched and pushed into the surface of a bed-cover with the tip of a needle; I did this with my mother while preparing bed-covers. I was struck by the structure of the woven canvas fabric. I felt that it could reveal something very meaningful. Later on, I started making different bottari installations when I returned to Seoul after the P.S.1 residency, which is
when my interests expanded and shifted more towards the conditions of women, and humanity in general, rather than individuals on a personal level. I started wrapping used clothes as bits of reality, unaltered. This was a change from the way that I used to cut the clothes in pieces – almost like pigment – which I wrapped in used bed-covers.

At that time, I was unaware of the feminist movement and that there were so-called textile artists who were weaving and making objects related to textiles. It seems that their use of textiles was motivated by very different concerns from given materials, whereas mine were generated from ‘canvas’ itself as the surface of painting. I was interested in the textile and the structure of canvas from the position of a painter rather than that of a textile artist. I was also writing my graduate thesis in 1983–84 in which I focused on the significance of the cross in contemporary art, the crucifix, its ubiquity and transcendence as well as its re-occurence across generations in contemporary art. This interest included ancient religious crosses that were also related to the human body and carried into the early stages of modern art and Constructivism as well. I began with sewing work combined with painting. I used acrylic paint as well as Chinese black ink for its tonality and expressive quality. In the beginning, I only used fabrics for sewing without any supporting structure. After my grandmother’s passing, I used her personal belongings, including her garments and her own woven silk. I had a deep attachment to her, and with that memory her clothes became my material for sewing. I assembled the pieces and in the process I felt the presence of her body and soul. I made vertical and horizontal sewn forms with small pieces of her clothing. These forms became crosses, triangles and oval shapes in sewn assemblages. Later on, I also used canvas fabric as a base for sewing large pieces using parts of clothing and pieces of bed-covers.

Elisabeth Millqvist
You explored what painting could look like for you. Earlier on, there was Dansaekhwa, the Korean art movement from the 1950s that rejected realism, choosing to paint only in monochrome, and later there was also the Japanese Mono-ha movement, with the Korean-born artist Lee Ufan as the main theorist.

Kimsooja
Although Ufan’s dot-and-line drawings were already known in the late 1970s when I was attending college, I first saw his pencil drawings on paper at the 10th Independants exhibition at Deoksugung Palace, where I was also participating with my first large scale cross-shaped sewn piece Portrait of Yourself (1983). Mono-ha is known more as a Japanese movement, which I was aware of due to Ufan’s presence as a Korean artist.

Elisabeth Millqvist
With Mono-ha emerging in the mid-1960s, exploring material in an unaltered state was central, and the non-making feels close to your work, but the movement was dominated by men and there was no interest in the domestic. A favoured material was rocks. Is this why I never heard you reference them as an artistic influence?

Kimsooja
Yes, and they were active a bit earlier. I knew about a few artists that were important at the time, but I pursued my own questions on the structure of the canvas based on my conditions of life and sensibility. Since then, my work expanded from domestic women’s labour to all human activities, especially after Sewing into Walking – Dedicated to the Victims of Gwangju (1995) and A Needle Woman (1999).

Elisabeth Millqvist
Through the inclusion of Chapters I, II and IV of the Thread Routes films in the exhibition, your different ways of working with textiles were emphasised. The first chapter was finished in 2010, but had already begun in 2002 in Bruges. Can you describe what you looked for when doing the Thread Routes films?

Kimsooja
When I first saw the lace makers in Bruges in 2002, I was captivated by the structure and the movement of the thread, as well as the hands that moved these threads. The relationship between the structure of the material and the bobbins and pins looked very much like an urbanscape. The way the thread moved to connect places was constructive in nature. I immediately looked at the surrounding buildings and I considered this perspective to be one way of constructing architecture: in a way it is men’s labour, and the activities seemed very similar in scale and materiality. But architecture is more about the solid surfaces, while textiles and lace-making seem to be more about the spaces in-between the lines in those structures. It can be fluid and transparent while seeming two-dimensional. I became interested in these comparisons and immediately wanted to relate them in my first film projects. I wanted to discover how these relationships developed all around the world in different cultural and geographical contexts. My interest then began to expand from textile and architecture to local vegetation and lifestyles, craftsmanship, garments, decorations and even cooking activities in India. Filmmaking expanded my interests and vision.

Elisabeth Millqvist
You did the Needle Woman performance in different parts of the world, and the Thread Routes chapters are filmed on different continents. Can you say something about your interest in the global perspective?

Kimsooja
A Needle Woman is where I am visible in the frame, although I don’t consider myself the subject matter per se. My body functions simply as a mediator or a certain kind of barometer of culture, geography and society.

When I was sewing bed-covers with my mother, I was pushing the needle into the silky, shiny, colourful Korean fabric. I felt an ‘electric shock’, as if it came from the universe and passed through my body all the way to the needlepoint touching the surface of the fabric. That was it. It was a threshold moment for me when I realised the way that I could conceptualise the structure of the canvas and its surface from the perspective of a painter. I also valued the experience I embodied from each performance and the unique
responses I received from the local people. I consider A Needle Woman to be a gaze out onto the world, towards humanity. It is a gaze of compassion. I also realised a needle is a hermaphrodite, a tool that disappears once the mediation is done. Thread Routes is my topographical gaze of threads, culture, especially textiles, craftsmanship, architecture and nature.

Elisabeth Millqvist
The movies are a continuous project; it’s not a fixed number?

Kimsooja
From the outset I wanted to complete six chapters in six geographical regions. So far, I have produced works about Peruvian weaving culture, European lace-making culture, Indian embroidery, block printing and dyeing culture, Chinese embroidery, garments, ornaments and dyeing culture, Native American weaving culture, and African weaving, mosaics and dyeing culture as a sixth chapter. I still wish to explore Aboriginal Australian weaving and painting, as well as other Oceanic weaving cultures. We were only able to go to Morocco in Africa, but even now I want to delve into Africa more deeply. I’m also very interested in Oceanic culture. I pursued neither Korean nor Japanese culture even though there are many elements that could be well connected. I want to reconnect and reshape other chapters if it comes together. I am open to it. It is an endless fascination and research project. It isn’t important to make a finished version.

Elisabeth Millqvist
In Thread Routes, the focus is textiles, architecture,craft and landscape. For other pieces you’ve worked with a lot of very skilled craftsmen and researched and explored material with them. Have you been involved in making yourself?

Kimsooja
No, it was always more about observation. With Thread Routes, it is the same. How I see the world and connect one element with another simply by looking at things. It was never about making any of them on my own, but about understanding how knowledge and traditions can be connected to different lifestyles across geographies and recontextualised in contemporary art and society.

Elisabeth Millqvist
At Wanås, what happens in the Thread Routes films – the making – happened live through the processing of the flax.

Kimsooja
That’s true, although I never thought about it that way. Maybe because I was not physically present at Wanås during the whole process. I find it a very interesting stage after the Thread Routes series. The exhibition is also a retrospective project that is linked to my sewing paintings from 1988 called Agriculture.

Elisabeth Millqvist
Yes, let’s talk about Agriculture. You painted on the canvas?

Kimsooja
In addition to painting, I also sewed and attached used clothing from my grandmother onto canvas. I wrote the title ‘agriculture’, which was perhaps overly didactic. In that moment, I became aware of agriculture, and of planting as an act of sewing on the ground. Conceptually, it was a very important moment that returned in 2020. It’s a cyclical painting practice that I’ve been doing ever since.

Elisabeth Millqvist
You talk about a healing perspective in your art, do you see a link between making and healing?

Kimsooja
I think there is a sense in which making art has always been a healing process for me. Sewing was not only about the structure of the world or a conceptual approach to the canvas; it also had a parallel importance as a healing process for myself and others. I was always vulnerable and compassionate.

There was a lot of pain inside me, memories of loss and life events that really made me consider sewing as a journey into the past or even the future from my present moment. It’s a kind of journeying across time. Stitching, in a way, is connecting two separate parts into one. That idea and mindset was always there. Interestingly, this conceptual approach and its emotional counterpart developed in parallel in my work until now. Sometimes this creates an interesting collision and a new discovery and development. I always feel a need to follow my desire and simply do away with thinking about any theory or concept in
advance. I just jump into the urge and that is what leads me.

Elisabeth Millqvist
Sometimes the audience in your work contributes to completing it – I’m thinking of Archive of Mind. What can completion be in the case of Sowing into Painting?

Kimsooja
That’s an interesting point.

Both are more about process than product. But the process is also one that produces a positive outcome. Archive of Mind was more focused on the mind of somebody who is making clay balls, while also activating the matter and its geometry as well. The clay is shaped into a sphere when one uses the force of both hands and fingers to push from all different angles and axes towards the centre to create balance. I discovered my mind also became balanced.

It is mathematical.

At the same time, we feel space in our mind clearing, becoming void. We start forgetting ourselves, our agony, discomfort, and worries. The edges and corners of our minds are rounded off just like the clay in our hands.

Related to a healing process, we lose ourselves when making and focusing on it as our mind creates space, and we feel more and more peaceful and balanced. That’s the process of healing in making. What is interesting is the way that physical geometry converges with the mind space.

Elisabeth Millqvist
From 1994, you only worked with used clothes – that makes sense from what you told me about the relationship to your grandmother. The bedspreads you use and the sheets in Laundry Field, as well as the fabrics in Deductive Object, are also used; we didn’t source new ones. What importance does it have for you?

Kimsooja
After using my grandmother’s belongings, such as her own garments or the silk fabrics that she had woven herself, I also began using my mother’s and friends’ garments as well as used clothing from anonymous and unknown people. The latter was more a feature of the Bottari pieces and especially Bottari Truck (1997). Those works relate to refugees, migration and wars in conflict zones. They implicate a broader social picture rather than a strictly personal one. At the same time, I was always conscious and interested in the formal context of these broader social issues in relation to the history of contemporary art.

Elisabeth Millqvist
You talk of wrapping and folding, but then there is also hanging. In an early work from 1978, you were hanging transparent film from a washing line.

Kimsooja
It’s interesting to remember this; back then it was enlarged negative film from my performative photos – standing in the woods, holding a gridded pattern of a traditional Korean door with its layer of rice paper removed so that it became transparent – hung along the gallery space like laundry with black-and-white negative film. At the time, the first hanging was done because I was dealing with transparency; and I needed transparent material to reveal that, enabling viewers to see through from both sides. On the floor, I inserted small Plexiglass Panels in-between several cut parts of trees’ growth rings, which were laid down as original forms. Recently, I completed a number of architectural film installation projects that convey iridescent light into space in the series To Breathe. There also seems to be a connection there, as it’s also about the surface and transparency; there’s a surface in-between – it’s the wall, the barrier, the
separation and the possibility of connection as well.

Elisabeth Millqvist
During the pandemic, many people have been turning inwards; it’s been a time for withdrawal, and in your video work we see you, we see your back. The viewer can feel as one with you, the artist, but in Thread Route we see only others. Have you withdrawn from the picture frame?

Kimsooja
I became the lens itself.

Elisabeth Millqvist
On the other hand, you’re present through your voice in many works. Tell me about your explorations with voice?

Kimsooja
I think it’s another way to thread yourself. I also have family connections; all my family members are very much into singing. My mother studied classical singing; she was always singing with the family, with all of us. My two brothers are musicians, and a music teacher once asked me to train as a singer.

But I knew the physical limitations in singing, so I didn’t want to go in that direction. I wanted something where I could be more contemplative throughout life, and that was more how I perceived the visual arts, more of being an observer.

Elisabeth Millqvist
In many ways, your work is very minimal – when you work with your voice it’s the same, you aren’t narrating things, it’s only the sound of breathing.

Kimsooja
Yes, breathing is also a transitional repetition on the boundary between life and death. We breathe in and out, and the moment when we stop is death. As long as it connects nonstop, it continues your life, but when it stops, that’s it. I connected the sound of breathing with sewing. In the Crystal Palace (Parque del Retiro, Madrid), I took the acts of looking in a mirror and walking as sewing, but also breathing as sewing. It is a sewing in and out of the border of our body, it’s a physical and a sonic activity, an invisible notion of sewing in space.

Elisabeth Millqvist
Fred Sandback spoke beautifully of yarn, saying that ‘knitting yarn is great for making proportions, intervals and shapes that build the places I want to see and be in, it’s like a box of coloured pencils.’ My understanding is that you want to add very little with your work –not build, but rather see?

Kimsooja
And to make one aware, and to understand.

Elisabeth Millqvist
Is this what the mirror is about?

Kimsooja
I think that the mirror gives a sense of awareness and recognition of oneself and the ‘other’. It’s confrontational. It has dualities within it, as something both virtual and real. The mirror is the only material that shows everything but itself. While I was working on the concept of mirroring as sewing, I also discovered that the mirror is the unfolded needle. Like A Needle Woman, it doesn’t show itself. It contains these sewing, connecting, reflecting elements in it. For me, the mirror is a painting itself.

Elisabeth Millqvist
What you say is interesting, that the mirror can’t show itself. You said about the barn, used for the mirror installation at Wanås, that you wanted it to be full but still empty. Can you elaborate on that?

Kimsooja
When I started using mirrors, I always felt that they were already complete. I didn’t need to add anything else with the exception of sound, which is immaterial. In a way, mirroring is more an action to reveal the existing structure. Instead of adding more objects, it duplicates but also expands existing structures and the forms in a different way. It’s an immaterial way of adding.

Elisabeth Millqvist
I think we can agree that spiritual knowledge can be acquired through and with the physical body; a lot seems to happen with visitors in your work. I asked you once if you wanted viewers to achieve a certain state of mind with your work. You said no, but sometimes this is the result.

Kimsooja
Yes, and actually I did add audiences to the space. I invited people, and they became the performers. The Crystal Palace of Reina Sofía piece (A Mirror Woman, 2006) was one of my first works, including To Breathe-Invisible Mirror, Invisible Needle at Teatro La Fenice, in which I invited audiences as performers in whatever way they wanted to be. I addressed it more in the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013, where I also transformed the viewers into performers. I think no one really thought of it, although maybe we can think of Anne Imhof and Tino Sehgal’s work like that, because they invite dancers and actual performers. I wanted to adapt this in a more subtle way, so that you aren’t even aware of it yourself. But I observe it as performing. I didn’t film it because I wanted to respect people’s natural interactions. But we have photographs of people lying down, looking up at the sky, leaning against the wall, just standing, looking down. I consider all of these activities as performance.

Elisabeth Millqvist
So, whether people feel that they’re entering a specific state is up to them?

Kimsooja
Exactly. I don’t like to force anything onto the viewer or make undue requests if someone is not ready. It’s more an invitation. People may not be aware that they are performing.

Elisabeth Millqvist
It’s a secret invitation – this is a wonderful way to end. Thank you for sharing.