When I was doing research for the location of the work To Breathe – Leiden I realized Museum De Lakenhal has an amazing history of textiles. I wanted to position my work on this spot at the canal, close to the museum and now my work is in the museum as well. It was destined to be. […]
When I was experiencing the presence of my outdoor sculptural lighting piece and the Lakenhal Museum spaces, I realized that the location was the perfect place for each of my works. Meta-Painting, the color of the wall paint, the structure of the architecture, and the Bottari pieces – it all works so well together, it really feels like home. It looks like these works have been here forever.

Kimsooja spoke these words during a symposium, that was held the day after her exhibition Thread Roots opened at Museum De Lakenhal. A few days earlier, she had seen for the first time how some of her iconic artworks had been installed in the Laecken-Halle. Dating from 1641, this is where woollen fabrics were inspected and traded until 1866. The textile industry flourished in Leiden in the seventeenth century, fuelled by an international export trade in textiles and by immigration. The production of woollen cloth defined the identity and status of the city of Leiden for seven centuries. This textile industry made Leiden the largest city in Holland and the most important textile centre in the world in the seventeenth century. Thousands of textile workers from the Southern Netherlands, England, Germany and France, fleeing political or religious persecution in their homelands, found work here. To ensure the quality of the cloth was consistent, the city council established seven inspection halls for various fabrics, the most important of which was the Laecken-Halle.[1]

At the heart of the old Lakenhal, seven centuries of Leiden cloth are brought to life in original period rooms. As Museum De Lakenhal, we present a tapestry of stories using historical and contemporary objects and artworks. Working with contemporary artists, we aim to create regular presentations that position historical stories and traditions within a new, twenty-first century narrative. The collaboration with Kimsooja, with her in situ installations, is the most recent. We’ll now walk through the spaces where her
works are installed.

Small Press

In the historical spaces of the Laecken-Halle, Kimsooja’s works establish a loose, yet meaningful connection with both the history of Leiden’s textile industry and the building’s current role as a museum for paintings and objects of historical value.

The Small Press, for example, features portraits of Pietro de Lepaul and his brother Gasparo by the painter Jean-Baptist Vanmour, a Frenchman who emigrated to Constantinople. The Lepauls were Leiden cloth merchants around 1700 in the Ottoman part of Smyrna. They commissioned angora goat wool yarn from local spinners, which they then sent to Leiden. There, domestic weavers turned the yarn into luxury camlet fabrics that were sent back to Smyrna to be sold on. The luxurious, lustrous garments lend their
wearers stature and are echoed in the Korean silk of Kimsooja’s Deductive Objects – Bottari Cart (2007). In this installation, Kimsooja combines her love of everyday objects, such as nineteenth-century French baguettes trollies, with her signature bottari. The trollies refer to the bundling, holding and moving of possessions, evoking images of migrants constantly on the move, or refugees without shelter, dragging their only possessions with them, tightly tied together, occasionally losing one on the way.

Displacement plays an important role in Kimsooja’s life and work. The daughter of a military man, she moved from place to place in her childhood in the border region between North and South Korea. The repeated packing and unpacking of belongings and the images of changing landscapes she saw gliding past her from trains, became recurring themes in her work in the early 1990s. Kimsooja herself also leads a nomadic existence between Paris, Seoul and other places.

Deductive Objects – Bottari Cart and the photograph Cities on the Move – 2727km Bottari Truck (1997-2001) establishes a connection with two allegorical paintings on the gallery wall about Leiden’s cloth industry by Leiden painter Isaac Claesz van Swanenburg: The Patroness of Leiden with the Old and New Syndicates (1596-1601) and The Patroness of Leiden Confers the Statutes on the Syndicates (1596-1601). These paintings refer to the arrival of new fabrics and inspection regulations for the cloth industry. Again, the influence of migration and foreign workers is evident here, as Flemish immigrants introduced these new fabrics, which were cheaper to produce than the old woollen cloth.

Kimsooja made Cities on the Move – 2727km Bottari Truck during an 11-day trip in November 1997, when she travelled to all the places she had lived in South Korea, just before she moved to New York. This photograph is one of the artist’s best-known images. All the strands of Kimsooja’s work intertwine here: voluntary (or involuntary) mobility; textile bundles that the artist has herself assembled; the strong figure of the woman, carrying the past with her, while looking towards the future. All bundled together in a powerful still of the performance and video.

Hall
The photograph Encounter – Looking into Sewing, 1998–2013 and the object Bottari (2000) dominate the most intimate of the textile collection rooms, the vestibule to the Syndics’ Chamber. Important records belonging to the syndics, the Cloth Hall’s Sample Books, were kept in a safe here from the seventeenth century.

The space is now occupied by (a photograph of) a mannequin veiled in Korean bedspreads. This picture was taken in an installation Kimsooja made for Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany in 1998. The sculptural figure – not Kimsooja herself – stood stock-still in the exhibition space. Visitors walked around it, expecting the figure to move, but it didn’t. ‘A performance without performing’, the artist calls it.

An encounter with this figure, whether live or in photographic representation, prompts curiosity, sparks the imagination and raises questions: Who is the figure underneath? What is their cultural identity? What stories and memories lie hidden in these used bedspreads? For Kimsooja, the encounter between viewer and image symbolises the making of connections, just as sewing or weaving textiles – bedspreads – creates connections. Not only literally, but conceptually, cross-culturally and figuratively too. There is no escaping these connections in this intimate space.

Bottaris, as Kitty Zijlmans highlights in her essay, occupy an important place in Kimsooja’s performances and films, serving as social sculptures in which memories, time and space converge. These characteristically colourful bundles represent mobility, migration and flight. Kimsooja’s bottaris are made from used, traditional Korean bedspreads wrapped around bundles of fabric and clothes. The four corners of the bedspread are tied together and decorated with symbolic embroidery. By giving the bottaris meaning, Kimsooja turns them into sculptures and art objects.

The bundles, according to the artist, ‘still carry the scents, memories, desires, “spirit” and life of their former owners’. The works also strongly address the human body and the cycle of life: birth, love, pain and death. As sculpture, the bundles can be considered both material and metaphor; bundling and
protecting personal belongings, while referring to such universal themes as home, emigration and mobility.

Syndic’s Chamber
Museum De Lakenhal has a rare collection of thousands of samples of fabrics made in Leiden up to 1977. Apart from the special samples from the cloth industry, it also contains nineteenth- and twentieth-century samples from famous Leiden textile factories, such as Krantz, Le Poole and Zaalberg.

After discovering Museum De Lakenhal’s sample collection, Kimsooja enthusiastically delved into her own textile archive, making a personal sample book and the installation Meta-Painting – Fabric Samples 2442-
24127 for this exhibition. Kimsooja drew inspiration for her sample book from the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century sample books in the Syndics’ Chamber, where two books from the cloth hall’s administration are on display. The coarse handmade cotton paper the artist has used for her book is powerfully echoed in the heavily distorted parchment of the historical examples.

Governor’s Room

Kimsooja created this personal installation Meta-Painting – Fabric Samples 2442-24127 (2024) especially for the eighteenth-century cloth-measuring table in the Governor’s Room. Kimsooja worked intuitively to create these compositions of textiles mounted on handmade cotton paper, basing her decisions on colour, material, texture and pattern. These samples form an artistic counterpart to the scientific methodology behind museum arrangements, the white canvases serving both as frames and painting supports.

On a number of sheets we see brightly coloured striped samples, sometimes narrow stripes, sometimes wide, often with embroidered details. The colours form the traditional Korean obangsaek colour spectrum: white, black, yellow, blue and red. East Asian traditions often use sets of five, in which colour is associated with the cardinal directions and the elements. The obangsaek colours symbolise the four cardinal directions (north, east, south, west) and the essential centre, and also refer to the five natural elements (air, fire, earth, water and – in Korean culture – metal). Kimsooja frequently incorporates this spectrum into her work.

Meta-Painting – Fabric Samples 2442-24127 is an interactive installation involving successive acts of selecting, examining, observing, feeling and grouping; changing all the time as visitors pick up, examine, observe, feel and group the pieces. Under the watchful eyes of the seventeenth-century governors (and contemporary security cameras), visitors are invited to put on white gloves and carefully move the sheets of colourful samples, one at a time, from canvas to canvas. Thus, you can browse through Kimsooja’s work with the attentiveness of a museum professional, or a performer.

Van Steijn galleries
Two chapters from the ongoing series are presented in the Museum De Lakenhal exhibition: Thread Routes – Chapter IV (China) and VI (Morocco), two different cultural spheres in which Asia is closely linked to the artist’s roots, and Morocco, like China, is a still major supplier of textiles to Europe. For the series Thread Routes, Kimsooja travelled to different cultural continents around the world to capture textile processes on 16mm film. The series currently comprises six chapters, which were filmed in Peru, Europe, India, China, Mexico and Morocco between 2010 and 2019.

Together, the films form a mosaic of different textile cultures and landscapes; a global tapestry joining past and present. The films celebrate artisanship and the landscape from which everything emerges, with textiles as the unifying element. Aesthetic images of cyclical production processes are accompanied by the natural sounds emitted by these activities and life in the surrounding landscape. Kimsooja regards Thread Routes as ‘visual poems’, as examples of ‘visual anthropology’. The films contemplate artisanal knowledge and traditions, and the similarities and differences between cultures, and between the roles of men and women. Such knowledge and traditions appear to play essentially the same role the world over. This work brings all these things together or, as Kimsooja herself says:

It is like one of my bottari pieces: capturing and embracing the reality of the world. In the Thread Routes films, I take my eyes as a bottari wrapping, my gaze as a needle and textile culture as a performative element. The relationships between nature, vegetation, local architectural structures and craftsmanship are the narrative. The narrative is there as in everyday life. In this way I unfold the way I look at the world. I look at the other and the connection I make between the object and humanity, nature and structure.

The installation Meta–Painting (2020) blends seamlessly with the architecture of Museum De Lakenhal’s new exhibition rooms from 2019, designed by Happel Cornelisse Verhoeven Architects (HCVA).[2] The
semi-transparent canvases seem to have been made especially for the main gallery, both in number and size, forming a shimmering, powdery image between the concrete trough shell roof, with its granulated stone coating, and the sandy-coloured terrazzo floor. The large arched window connects the space to everyday life outside and, through its shape and light, is a prominent presence in the installation.

Kimsooja literally and figuratively returns to her artistic roots with this installation of linen canvases, reducing painting to its most elementary form: the canvas. Any reference to colour or decoration is omitted. The essence of a canvas is here presented in its purest material form: a woven fabric made from flax that was sown and harvested by the artist herself. Meta–Painting is about painting, but without the need for paint.

In this new exhibition space, Kimsooja’s work once again connects with Museum De Lakenhal’s past as a textiles inspection hall and workshop where workers, merchants and dignitaries mingled daily, where seventeenth century syndics held textiles up to the light, inspecting them for flaws and irregularities.
The strength and beauty of Kimsooja’s finely woven canvases encourage us to do the same. As a visitor, you scan the surfaces for differences, irregularities, examine their transparency, follow the strong verticals and horizontals of the stretcher frames. Striding like a performer between the individual parts, you
too in turn become an image on a canvas.