In some of her most recent pieces, Kimsooja alludes to her work’s roots in painting.

As a child I painted in a Cézannesque style, and I struggled to find the right structure and methodology for my further work. I wrote my Master’s thesis on the sign of the cross and how it appeared in visual art from ancient times until then [...]. Since it reflects the structure of the human mind, the cross is such a fundamental shape [...]. When I realised this, I began to use sewing as an artistic method. I actually discovered the cross-woven canvas and I started working with bedspreads, she explained[1]. In the works that emerged, she tried to ‘liberate the confines of the canvas’.

The bottaris and bedspreads bore an intimate relation to her everyday life. She made the beds with her mother, folding and laying out the covers in a particular way, following traditional Korean bed-making methods. Sewing was a regular part of this domestic ritual.

Decades later, Kimsooja revisited her relationship with painting in her series Meta-Painting (2020- ). However now, in true Neo-Dadaist fashion, she did so without touching a brush. The installation Meta-Painting is the logical successor from her exhibition Sowing into Painting (2020) in Wanås, Sweden, for which she grew the raw material for the canvas and linseed oil: flax. As a pendant to the ‘empty’, unprepared canvases on cross shaped stretchers and slats, bottaris emerged made from the same linen
woven from the same Swedish flax that Kimsooja had planted. In a recent exhibition in Berlin, To Breathe (2023), the artist allowed the ‘blank’ canvases to be illuminated by daylight entering the space through diffraction grating film on the gallery windows. The ‘woven’ structure of the film, which has 5,000 tiny horizontal and vertical scratches per centimetre, worked like a myriad of prisms, causing the constantly changing daylight to diffract into the colours of the rainbow. In Leiden, Kimsooja allowed visitors to compose their own patterns on the same unprepared canvases as they wandered through the installation.

Nothing less than the totality of life and art constitutes the subject of Kimsooja’s deeply-existential work. The titles of her works and exhibitions reflect this interconnection between art and life, succinctly echoing both the evolution of her artistic ideas and the key processes at play in her practice. Kimsooja is considering making a retrospective exhibition one day, in which she would bring together all the titles of all her works. Central to her practice are seemingly mundane actions and notions, such as wrapping, sewing, weaving and breathing, which she transforms into reflections on the human condition, migration, transculturalism and spirituality. Kimsooja masterfully makes manifest the sensuousness and metaphors that are embedded in ostensibly commonplace contexts.

Kimsooja’s work has been at the heart of a more globally oriented art world that has been evolving since the 1990s. We cannot overestimate the extent to which Kimsooja has enriched art and our contemplation of the world through concepts borrowed from Eastern philosophy and Korean cultural traditions.