Belongings wrapped in fabric and fastened with a knot – simple bundles found in all cultures and ages. Eminently practical they are too. Untie the knots and you have a bedspread or blanket ready to use. In Korea, these bundles are called bottari and they have an iconic status in the work of artist Kimsooja. Born Soo-Ja Kim in Daegu, South Korea, in 1957, she adopted her artist’s name Kimsooja in 2003. This presentation of Kimsooja’s work at Museum De Lakenhal is the first solo presentation of her work in the Netherlands. Renowned around the world, her work has been exhibited in numerous museums, exhibitions and biennials, including Documenta in Kassel. Her site-specific installations can be enjoyed in many places around the world, with the city of Leiden now lucky enough to be among them. When Kimsooja won the first Lucas van Leyden Prize (2020), she made her work To Breathe – Leiden (2022). Situated near the museum, the work’s large, semi-circular white arches connect, like huge stitches, the canal banks Oude Singel and the Oude Vest. Reflecting in the water at night, these illuminated arches create beautiful dancing circles on the canal; the arches becoming a tunnel and the ‘stitches’ continuous motion.

The metal arches in this work and Kimsooja’s textile bottaris may seem far removed from one another, but in this article I want to show how holistic her work is and to explore the rich and deeply human worldview embedded within it. I’ll start with a bottari, unbuttoning the colourful bundle and opening out the bedspread. Now I have a rectangular canvas. Its four corners are my guides, pointing to four key, interconnected concepts that I discern in her work: the horizontal (Threads), the vertical (Roots), the woman (Eye of the Needle), the material (Matter and spirit). Will you join me in finding out what’s bundled inside Kimsooja’s bottari?

Threads

The exhibition at Museum De Lakenhal has been given the title Thread Roots, pointing to interconnectedness; the thread of life that intertwines with others, with art, but also the movement of humans over the earth, as expressed in the journeys in Kimsooja’s film series Thread Routes. ‘Roots’ also refers to the museum building’s original purpose as a cloth inspection hall. As we will see, Kimsooja draws constantly on a wellspring of textile forms.
It’s no coincidence that Kimsooja frequently uses the homophones ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ in her titles. The two are related. Where routes unfold horizontally, roots extend downwards (more on ‘being rooted’ in a bit). Kimsooja travels to all corners of the globe to make the films for her series Thread Routes. Six parts have already been completed, propelled by her passion for all kinds of handicrafts and textile cultures all over the world; from Peruvian rugs and Bruges lace, to Indian embroidery and Native American weaving. Two films from this series are being shown in Leiden: Thread Routes – Chapter IV, China (2014) and Chapter VI, Morocco (2019). These are very quiet, still films, even as they depict numerous kinds of human activity, such as wool carding, yarn spinning and fabric weaving, or the meticulous mosaic art of Morocco. But they also show nature in its varied splendour – at times overwhelming, at times sweetly gentle. We hear the sounds of nature – wind blowing, corn rustling, birds singing, ambient noise – along with sounds of mosaic ceramics being cut, or bells tinkling on women’s clothing. The produce of these landscapes, the sources of these sonic tapestries, resonate through the textiles in their weaves, textures and patterns.
Much of the handiwork in these films is done by women and, as we will see later, women occupy a central place in Kimsooja’s work. Her attachment to the earth, however, extends further. When she first visited the Wanås Konst sculpture garden on an organic farm in Sweden, she quickly set her sights on growing flax for linseed oil (for paint) and linen fibre (for canvas). It was the nature of the place that prompted her to do so. Besides being a source of physical painting materials, the field became a fluid tableau of patterns woven into the earth; Sowing into Painting symbolising the cycle of life and art.

The horizontal also stands for movement, working the land, walking the land; threading, stitch by stitch, dipping in and out; the vertical act of sewing and embroidery, but also the body, the artist herself, like a walking needle, binding life and nature in mundane, but essential acts. Bundled in a bottari, ready to move on, go further.
For me, the horizontal also connects Kimsooja to other artists, past and present. In orienting along the horizontal and vertical, for example, Kimsooja’s work alludes to that of the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), or the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935); the crossing horizontal and vertical forming a symbol that is familiar the world over.
Conveying the inner structure of the world, beknottedness, while referring to the tying of bedspread corners to enfold one’s belongings. In Deductive Object (1993), for example, two horizontals and two verticals form an open structure, a framework wrapped in pieces of coloured cloth and bound with threads. ‘Deductive’ means inferring the particular from the general (often a theory).
In this work, the geometrical form is stripped of its hard edges, softened with cloth, made personal with pieces of fabric that once served another purpose.

All over the world in recent years, we have seen an enormous resurgence of the use of fabrics, weaving and embroidery in contemporary art. We don’t have to look far: in 2020 Museum De Lakenhal exhibited large-scale, woven works by artist, farmer and activist Claudy Jongstra (Roermond 1963), which recall the origins of wool manufacture and processing. Museum De Lakenhal was originally built in 1641 as a Laeken-Halle, a cloth hall where Leiden cloth was inspected and traded. The city of Leiden with its history of making cloth and later woollen blankets, is an obvious place to showcase these kinds of contemporary art practices based on textile. Place, history and material are intertwined here, proving a great source of inspiration for Kimsooja and the work she made for Leiden.

Roots

The horizontal is literally intertwined with the vertical in bottaris. Items for a journey are wrapped in a bedspread, traditionally handmade and given as a wedding present, and knotted into a bundle. This bundle represents many things: (personal) life, items you are emotionally attached to or need, memories, stories, the origin of the material used, the culture you hail from, which for Kimsooja is Korean. The bottari thus connects her to her homeland, rooting her in Korean culture.

This cultural anchoring first became really apparent to Kimsooja when she travelled to Japan in 1978. There, she became aware of the vast differences between Korea and Japan. What is her own culture? What elements are particularly Korean in art and architecture? What special use of colour, or specific cultural practice is Korean? She homed in on the bottari, which has been central to her work ever since. Kimsooja has often spoken of how she arrived at this choice.
Her grandmother, a weaver of silk, had a deep fascination for fabrics, which had a profound effect on Kimsooja. From her mother she learned how to integrate this intimacy into her work. A lovely quote can be found in a text by Airyung Kim from 1998:

"One day while sewing a bedcover with my mother, I had a surprising experience in which my thought, sensibility and action at that moment all seemed to converge. And I discovered new possibilities for conveying buried memories and pain, as well as life’s quiet passions. I was fascinated by the fundamental orthogonal structure of the fabric, the needle and thread moving through the plane surface, the emotive and evocative power of colourful traditional fabric."

In 1997 Hans Ulrich Obrist asked her how she came to work with clothes:

In 1983, I spent some time sewing bedcovers with my mother. At that time, I was looking for a proper methodology with which to examine both the ideas of surface and life. Painters always struggle with surfaces which, to me, seem like walls that we can hardly overcome. I wanted to overcome that wall and to reach the other side of its surface. When my grandmother passed away, I saved all the traditional Korean clothes she used to wear. They reminded me of her presence. Then, when I decided to create my own form of art by sewing, I started using these worn clothes as my preferred material.

As personal as bottaris are for Kimsooja, working with old and used fabrics connects her to life in a broader sense. Life and art are inseparable for her. The bedcover encompasses the burden, the whole of life: birth, love, rest, illness, death; enwrapping fabrics of all sorts, garments that belonged to her mother and friends, but also to people she never knew. This makes the bottaris very corporeal; the clothes have been worn, the wearers’ odours still emanate from the aged and stained fabrics. Encapsulated in the bundles, they journey with them. Her video works Bottari Truck (1997), about her 11-day journey through Korea seated atop a pile of bottaris on the back of a truck, and the later work Bottari Truck Migrateurs (2007-2009), refer both to her own life, the many times she moved house with her family, and to refugees, migration and warzones. They hence engage with a broader social realm than the purely personal and make an artistic-activist statement.

Kimsooja once again became aware of the bottari, not as an everyday utility item, but as an art object, when she was on an artist-in-residence programme at PS1 contemporary art centre in New York in 1992. As usual, she had knotted things into a bundle and casually placed them in the space, when her eye fell on the bottari. Instead of seeing an everyday, utility item, she saw a form, a three-dimensional object with its own distinctive features, shape, colour and texture – an example of the art of not making. Close to home, close to the person and yet so universal.

Eye of the needle

Amidst the huge crowds of the Shibuya pedestrian zone in Tokyo, Japan, a woman stands dead still. People stream past, no one seems to notice her. In China’s Shanghai, people look awkwardly at this silent figure. In Delhi, India, they stare at her unabashedly. In all their stillness, these performances by Kimsooja exude life and social connection: ‘Without a needle, there would be no fabric’, the Needle Woman says, ‘and without each individual, no fabric of society.’ The walking body is like the motion of a needle passing through cloth. Once again, it is the woman who establishes the connection. This reflection on identity and its social implications is characteristic of Kimsooja’s performances, in which she photographs herself, as in the work Encounter – Looking into Sewing (1998/2013), or is filmed from the back in busy streets around the world, as in A Needle Woman, A Beggar Woman and A Homeless Woman.

The body as symbolic needle has a pendant in physical work with needle and thread; the age-old acts – as essential as they are mundane – of manufacturing woollen, silk, cotton and linen threads, dyeing and weaving fabrics, and sewing clothes. In the Confucian tradition, this is predominantly the domain of women, which is why women naturally play a central role in Kimsooja’s work. Not liking to be called a feminist, the feminine is one of many elements in her work, she explains. This makes the work no less political for me. Its statement, however, is not blatant, but subtle: the female perspective (the eye of the needle), the presence of women, the feminine as inseparable from life, indispensable.

Matter and spirit

Kimsooja’s oeuvre is characterised by a powerful unity of action and response in her interaction with materials. These range from physical materials, such as paint, fabrics, textiles, metal, glass, ceramics, mirrors, soil, the earth, to ephemeral ‘immaterials’, such as colour, light, air, movement, even breath – hence the many works with the title To Breathe. These two types of ‘substances’ are like two sides of a coin, inseparable dichotomies that criss-cross all her work: inside/outside, do/leave, moving/still, hard/soft, translucent/opaque. The material is her co-creator, in which we see another fusion of material-artist-act.

Colour plays a significant role in Kimsooja’s work, as it does in Korean culture. Bright emerald green, golden yellow and purple-red magenta, for example, often feature in Korean women’s traditional hanbok. These costumes, comprising long-sleeved jackets or blouses and long, high-waisted skirts, are often beautifully embroidered. As the eye follows the patterns, the work becomes an event and the colours become cultural markers. The bedspread, symbolically representing the five cardinal directions (north, south, east, west, centre) and their colours, also refers to mandalas. These Buddhist devotional images are often regarded as diagrams or symbols of an ideal universe.

Kimsooja began her career in painting and a painter’s affinity with colour and its power of expression reverberates throughout her work. Sometimes she paints with light, with prisms, reflections, sunlight, at others with fabrics and crops. Yet in some of her recent work, she abandons colour altogether and, as contradictory as this may sound, turns to pure, uncoloured materials, as in Meta–Painting (2020). A meta-painting can be understood as a statement about painting as noun and verb; a reflection on the essence of this art form. In Meta–Painting, we see uncoloured linen stretched on wooden frames and a number of bottari of the same material, containing locally sourced used clothing. The linen canvases are translucent, letting through very subtle light, while the bottaris have become more object-like than ever, through their monochrome colour. And so the cycle is complete; from pure material, through numerous applications and back to where it began. Sowing and harvesting flax and processing it into textiles, as reflected in the works Sowing into Painting; the whole path, from sowing to sewing, the everyday acts of making materials and translating basic shapes, like the rectangle and circle, into works of art.

In the Governor’s Room at Museum De Lakenhal, we find another, more participatory dimension to her Meta–Painting. Visitors are invited to physically examine and move the samples that have been arranged by Kimsooja in compositions on blank, linen canvases. The audience thus subjects the compositions to constant change. The activities take place, as it were, at the centre of an unfolded bottari: a place of coming together, of participation.

We wrap the four points of the fabric together again and tie a knot. The bottari is a package once more, the world in microcosm.