• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  How did you start working with clothes?

• Kimsooja
  In 1983, I spent some time sewing bed covers 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.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  Was your grandmother close to you?

• Kimsooja
  Yes, her fascination with fabrics influenced me a lot; then, my mother taught me how to represent this closeness through my work. One day, while I was sewing a bed cover with my mother, I put a needle right in the middle of the texture of the fabric. At that moment, I realized that I had found the methodology I was searching for. In the texture of the fabric I discovered the answer to all my questions; in sewing I learned to nurture my emotions and pains.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  I'm very interested in the different uses of the same object and also by the different relations to clothes in eastern and western contexts. In Japan, when a grandmother or grandfather dies, the family saves the clothes: throwing away the clothes of a dead person is a taboo. In Europe it is very different, people want to get rid of them as soon as possible. How is it in Korea?

• Kimsooja
  In Korea they usually ceremonially burn cloths used by the dead person. But it really depends on the family; in my case I wanted to keep all the clothes with me.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  You often mention the relation between painting and sewing. Could we say, in terms of material too, that painting is a very male dominated form of expression?

• Kimsooja
  Yes, I think so. I was not conscious of doing "feminist work." But of course I do, as I live as a woman artist in a country like Korea. For me, the most important material is my life. I cannot escape from the feminist issue because that is my reality, but I don't want to define myself as a feminist artist; I would like to reach the totality of life and art.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  The issue of women artists is now emerging in Korea too. When I first visited Korea, it was very obvious that the most interesting work within the younger generation of contemporary artists, was being done by women...

• Kimsooja
  Yes, this is a very recent development. I, for example, try to solve my own difficulties and pressures within our society through my work, in a very indirect way.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  Tell me more about this notion of "wrapping the bundle."

• Kimsooja
  In Korean society, when we say "wrap the bundle," it generally means leaving or moving. My bundles, instead, have nowhere to go. Instead of wrapping the bundle for leaving, I prefer to accumulate them.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  The issue of clothes and the choice of material lead, somehow, to the question of the ready-made. You said that you exhibited clothes that have all already been used.

• Kimsooja
  1 usually wrap clothing that has been used; so, in a way, it's like hugging the people who wore them.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  The frequent use you make of bedcovers is striking. The bed is basically the place where we are born and where we die.

• Kimsooja
  Yes, it is the basic field of birth and death. And the human body, the most complicated bundle, lies on and under this bedcover. Making bundles is like wrapping bodies and souls within your own skin. The skin represents another kind of fabric, while the bedcover is like our skin. It protects and isolates you from the world outside. It is hugging; it is rejecting.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  When you showed me the images of the work you exhibited at the Kwangju Biennial, the skin seemed to me to be a particular kind of fluid. The skin represents the barrier from the inside to the outside; but the skin is also a porous surface...

• Kimsooja
  Yes, it is always a question of going back and forth, in-between the woven fabric which is made of horizontal and vertical structures. Also, the process of sewing is composed of a series of vertical and horizontal acts, moving against and beyond the fabric itself.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  It is like sewing through boundaries.

• Kimsooja
  When you see the sewn work from the surface, it looks like a complete structure. But when you see the whole series of processes, they remind you more of a circulating spiral shape. My work, which is wrapping the fabric on the object, is a similar process to sewing. Sewing is like wrapping fabric with threads. Sewing also entails a series of circular processes, just like my objects and my installation with wrapped rings. This time, the ring sews the space itself.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  These big rings can be moved by people. It is very interesting to compare them to sewing: going from plane to round implies a transition. Could we say that the rings mark the moment when you actually go into the space and transform it in an installation?

• Kimsooja
  For me the process of wrapping and sewing is like holding or hugging with the intention of keeping things to myself. Whenever I make bundles, it's like inviting things to become part of my skin. Things can be visible but also invisible. It is really a symbolic act, more symbolic than actually wrapping and binding.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  When I saw your bundles I thought of migration in terms of homelessness, refugees, or immigrants of any sort, a nomadic population with all of their objects and belongings carried in the bundle.

• Kimsooja
  In the moderm society, bundles have been changing into bags. For me this is like a symbolic ghost that can't be thrown away; a ghost representing our life. A bundle is the minimum we carry through our lives. When I was little, we moved a lot from village to village, city to city, and it influences my work. This is a nomadic body of work.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  Jonas Mekas distinguishes the voluntary migrant from the involuntary migrant, the refugee, the person who is not able to choose his/her emigrating destiny. In a conversation I had with Paul Virilio, he talked about all these travelers, homeless, refugees, and about an increasingly mobile society. How do you feel about this notion of migration right now?

• Kimsooja
  It is linked to the opening up of a world of information and a world of interaction between cultures and people. A global sewing... But it seems also to be a question of the hesitation of living here or not, of being or not being; that is why there is all this moving around.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  So one could say that, somehow, it's all a general "in-between-ness." Jean-Luc Godard said: "everything is in between."

• Kimsooja
  I think so too. We can be in, we can be out. I wrap my bundle, I open it up, as I need... When I feel full of energy, I open up my bundles, as I need them, to liberate and release my body. When I did a wall piece at P.S.1 in New York, I put small pieces of fabrics into the holes of the wall and it was like burying fragments of my body. After taking out the fabrics, I felt as though I was being released from the wall, from the intensity. I am very fascinated by that kind of energy that flows in between an object and myself.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  In your most recent work, the object seems always related to the subject. People are encouraged to walk on your piece, or to open the bundles, where they are allowed to put some of the clothes and make their own monuments. In the piece you made in Edinburgh for the cafeteria you covered the table with bed covers: the objects seem increasingly placed in relation to people.

• Kimsooja
  You are talking about Information and Reality, the show at the Fruitmarket. I tried to invite people to express themselves right on the table cloths, communicating, eating, drinking, arranging glasses and dishes... Spreading bedcovers on the tables is like creating a canvas which is invisibly wrapping the whole space.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  How did it happen in the Kwangju installation with millions of people walking on it? Did it really work?

• Kimsooja
  I think so. I didn't imagine that so many people could interact within the installation. The visitors opened up all the bundles and took the clothes wrapped inside. At the beginning, I brought 2.5 tons of clothes, and almost 1 ton was taken away by the audiences. This was an outdoor project, but when I presented it in a museum the audience touched and took some fabrics from the bundles, even while the guards were there.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  At the exhibition in Nagoya you are showing the same thing in three different forms.

• Kimsooja
  On the floor at the entrance, I put several piles of used clothes; in between I installed some bundles; then I covered the piles with used Korean bedcovers: it was like putting my hands on dead bodies. For me, these different stages of using fabrics represent three different kinds of planes. But they also represent three different stages of mind.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  Were the transitions fluid?

• Kimsooja
  Mostly. I also put Japanese clothes like Kimonos, and ordinary everyday Japanese clothes together, and I wrapped the bundles with Korean clothes. The day after the opening, somebody, I don't know who, came and spread one big sheet of Japanese cloth on the piles.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  On the Korean clothes?

• Kimsooja
  It seemed like that, yes.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  Were they initially separated?

• Kimsooja
  There were some Korean and Japanese clothes mixed together, but I think he or she considered it as a nationalistic statement.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  When I saw your bundles, I clearly understood that your work deals with the concept of participation. This is that notion of object-subject that, as we said, can he found in your work.

• Kimsooja
  The clothes spread on the mountain hill in Kwangju are meant to be like one big sheet of fabric covering nature. I let people walk on this fabric which is somewhere between nature and the body. Here our body represents the needle with which I am sewing the fabric of nature.

• Hans Ulrich-Obrist
  I can see this notion also in those big photographs where the clothes seem to be like an organic element.

• Kimsooja
  In the work I did in 1994 for the show Sewing into Walking in Seoul, I tried to connect the concept of "sewing" to that of "walking." I transferred my concepts from the field of painting to that of daily life.

• Marnie Fleming
  How is it that you came to work with cloth?

• Kimsooja
  I can never forget the moment in 1983 when I was sewing our traditional silk bedcovers with my mother. When I tried to put the needle into the fabric I had an exhilarating feeling, as I had been searching for a proper way with which to examine both the ideas of "surface" and of "life. As a painter I had always struggled with the idea of surface and wanted to get beyond that. I wanted to find a way of penetrating the surface to the underside. I had a strong desire to get to the backside of the plane. This simple action of sewing seemed to answer all my questions, and, as well, in the act of sewing I learned to nurture my emotions and pain. It gave me confidence. Prior to this discovery I had tried many different mediums such as canvas, glass, wood, paper but I could never resolve these materials with myself. I suppose I was attracted to the fabric as it was a part of my life. It also had an inside and an outside which permitted me to have an ongoing conversation or interaction through the process of needlework. In some ways I saw it as a mirror-I wanted to get to the other side so that I could see myself- or have something of myself on the underside as well.

• Marnie Fleming
  What is the importance of cloth in your culture?

• Kimsooja
  Our way of life is like a performance with cloth, living out life in cloth, beginning with the wrapping of babies at birth, and ending as death shrouds for the deceased. Special colourful cloths are also used for occa- sions such as birthdays, weddings, funerals and ancestor rituals in Korea. Women in particular have a strong relationship with cloth and often pass special fabrics on from one generation to the next. Bedcovers too, are another way we wrap ourselves in cloth. In Korea they are especially colourful and are chosen by a young bride and her mother before the marriage. It is common for sections of green and red coloured cloth to be sewn together. In Asian society, the colours green or blue are symbolic of the male, or heaven, and red or pink symbolic of the female, or earth. When they appear together in such a way, it is symbolic of their lives coming together. In many ways I see the bedcovers as a metaphor for love, difficulties and dramas played out while under them. I think the bed is a very important place. It is where we are born and die, sleep and love. A bedcover is like our skin, it protects and gives warmth but it is ambivalent, it can reject as well as hug.

• Marnie Fleming
  You have always employed used bedcovers which you have collected over the years from used clothing stores. Some of them have patterns or symbols on them which are often repeated. Do these have a significance?

• Kimsooja
  Yes. They are all bedcovers which I found in second-hand shops, which means they were discarded by those who had slept under them. So I feel the fabrics retain a memory and a history of lives lived. And their symbols of turtles and deer, for example, represent long life. A couple of birds and butterflies with flowers are symbolic of love, and the image of the purse is a sign of good fortune. These all represent best wishes for a married couple who dream and sigh underneath the bedcovers.

• Marnie Fleming
  Why did you decide on clotheslines for your Oakville installation?

• Kimsooja
  When I saw the space I was impressed with the high, black ceilings and overhead fans. I wanted to take advantage of these unusual elements to create something I couldn't do elsewhere. I imagined my fabrics would have a harmony with the wind produced by the fans and that they would be very dramatic against the black ceiling. I also had the walls painted black to unify the space and further set off the various coloured bedcovers.

• Marnie Fleming
  In Canada people hang their laundry in their backyards. Can you provide us with a mental picture of what clotheslines look like in Korea?

• Kimsooja
  In a traditional Korean home there is a front yard where we hang our laundry. It is a part of our landscape. Laundry is very much part of women's work. Once the clothes are dry, women starch and iron all cotton fabrics - a very tedious and time-consuming activity. In my own way, I try to give meaning to this everyday routine in my artwork; I feel an empathy with it as an artist. I see my art as the conceptualization of every-day life. For me, there is a certain artistic value in these mundane female activities, which retain a lot of contemporary art issues-including performance art involv- ing gestures, time and ritual. There is always a very fine line between art and life.

• Marnie Fleming
  Your work is intricately bound up with notions of the feminine. What is it like to be a female artist working in Korea today?

• Kimsooja
  There are many female artists in South Korea and there is a constant struggle to be recognized. For the most part I have been invited to partici- pate in exhibitions by curators outside of Korea. In Korea there has always been a traditional patriarchal system. I was fortunate to have a lucky break when I was accepted for the P.S. 1 Residence in New York from 1992-93. I had a chance to meet many curators and exhibit my work.

• Marnie Fleming
  What is your sense of who your audience is for your work?

• Kimsooja
  I think it will be people who respect other cultures and are sensitive to other peoples' difficulties, as well as those who perceive my work aesthetically. It is my hope that my installations will trigger their own memories and thoughts on life, but in a contemporary art context.

• Marnie Fleming
  In recent installations the audience has been encouraged to walk on the cloths and to open the bundles or bottari. Now in your installation for Oakville Galleries the audience must walk through or between clotheslines of bedcovers. It would seem as if your objects are increasingly placed in direct relationship with your audience and that there is a performative aspect to your work. Can you comment?

• Kimsooja
  When I do needle work, wrap things or make bundles, the whole process is for me a performance. I always see my process as circular, continuous movements, whether it be sewing, making bundles or wrap- ping. These actions are like a conversation. For example, when we sew, the needle pierces the cloth and then returns with every stitch. When we "talk" or "look", that is like sewing. More recently my work relies on the movement of the viewer through the space. I am interested in the energy that flows between the object and the viewer. In a sense I see the view- ers' bodies walking through the installation like a needle with which to stitch together their experience and their memories with my fabrics.

• Marnie Fleming
  Previously your work was quite static and now with the movement of cloth from the overhead fans and with the bodily movement of your audi- ence there is a greater sense of drama and animation. It is as if you are already anticipating working with the stage. Has this been conscious?

• Kimsooja
  No, not at all. But I am very, very excited about the prospect of work- ing with the Toronto Dance Theatre. From the time I was in New York I began to think about the possibility of working with dancers but I was unable to realize this. A little while ago I made a video of myself in slow motion. In the video I picked up bedcovers, placed them on my arm, made a bundle and left. In watching it I realized that, in a different context, it was a dance. Dance can be found in everyday simple movements. When I work with bedcovers I always imagine the bodies that were wrapped in them. I have never worked with real bodies in movement with my fabrics, but I've always been conscious of the hidden bodies within. Working with the Toronto Dance Theatre will be my next challenge.

"My art is the conceptualisation of everyday life, especially women's work." Soo-Ja Kim, 1994

• Soo-Ja Kim is an artist from South Korea. It is a country with an ancient cul- ture long dominated by China, colonized by Japan, and then suddenly brought into a Western-style capitalist economy less than half a century ago - with explosive results. International corporations such as Hyundai and Samsung, originating in South Korea, have now become household names to us in Canada. Economic prosperity has also contributed to a thriving cultural scene with the investment of financial and human resources in the visual arts, which received a further boost in 1988 with the Seoul Olympics.

• The relatively recent collision of past and current realities for South Korean artists has led to the creation of art works which embody both staunch traditionalism and radical innovation. In fact, "hybridism" is the key word for describing the diversity of work being produced. The fusion of traditional and new techniques of artmaking converge with the diffusion of global consumer culture as experienced through such channels as mass media, music and fashion. Ranging from highly Westernized techniques to more localized and indigenous elements, South Korean artists have redefined and renegotiated what was "traditional" in ways which are now challenging and provocative. It is in this terrain, between the traditions of everyday life and radical innovation, that we may locate the work of Soo-Ja Kim.

• Kim was born in 1957 in Daegu, the provincial capital of south-eastern Korea and, appropriately enough, a city with an important textile industry. After completing her Master's degree in painting in 1984 at Hong-lk University,Seoul, she then studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris. In 1992-93 she was artist-in-residence at P.S.1 in New York. In recent years she has received world-wide acclaim for her unique installations, which incorporate brightly coloured clothing and traditional Korean bed covers.

• Since the mid-80's Kim has been working with patches of typically colourful Korean cloth culled from the used clothing of family and friends. The essence of Korean life can be found in their traditional fabrics, beginning with the wrapping of babies at birth, and ending with death shrouds for the deceased. Special cloths are also used for occasions such as birthdays, weddings, funerals and ancestor rituals. Such fabrics are especially familiar to women, and, accordingly, contain a history of life passed from one generation to the next.

• Kim's involvement with textiles started while sewing bed covers with her mother - an initial interest in cloth that began as an exploration of surface treatment and two-dimensional planes. She emphasized the materiality of the cloth itself by creating assemblages and wrapping ordinary objects. This eventually led to something more structural and she began to see, inherent within the cloth, a mediated history of Korean women who sew, mend, wrap and wash with it.

• In 1992 she began working with bottari-Korean wrapping cloth usually tied into a bundle for carrying various household goods. She regarded bottari as being similar to the body, which can also be bundled and wrapped. The cloth, in her view, was like a skin. Bottari also has significance as a container, or vessel, for carrying and transporting all sorts of goods. When a cloth is spread out it invites people in, and when it is used to wrap something it signifies parting, or may even suggest notions of travel. In Korea, the words "to wrap in a bundle" mean to part, especially when a woman leaves home. Typically Kim's installations incorporate an abundance of the brightly coloured bottari which are carefully arranged or stacked by the artist. They demand a physical interaction from the viewer which eventually translates into a powerful emotional involvement. Piles of bottari lend an unrestrained physical presence and invest the work with a personal history. They suggest something nomadic, unstable, and have a haunting quality that takes us into realms of perception and imagination. By employing the fabric in her artmaking, Kim also marks activities of everyday life which have been carried on by Korean women for generations.

• There can be little doubt that South Korea's recent economic boom would not have been possible without the participation of women. Yet, despite their dramatic gains in power, a division of labour on the basis of gender can still be observed. Certain tasks associated with domestic life (cleaning, cooking, child care) are considered appropriate to women, while men dominate in such areas as business and political life. Kim's strategic use of common cloth such as bedcovers and bottari -and the abundance of them-create powerful statements about socio-cultural traditions which allow such gender discrimination to continue.

• Like all of Kim's installations, A Laundry Field — Sewing into Walking, Looking into Sewing, created for Oakville Galleries, involves an investigation with cloth and women's labour-particularly the process of hanging clothes out to dry- and sewing. The large space of Centennial Gallery has been painted black and contains dozens of colourful billowing Korean bedcovers strung, in clothesline fashion, from one end of the gallery to the other. There is a swirling energy from the overhead fans as the bedcovers create alleyways for the viewer to walk through or between. Wind generated movement becomes animation as Kim makes the bed covers' intimate relationship with women's lives, as well as their role in the division of labour, instructively visible.
  As her title implies, Kim views her objects and installations as an extension of the act of sewing. With each step our body serves as a metaphorical needle, moving from one plane of fabric to the next, or moving from the front to the back, or what seems like an inside to an outside. The space between is by necessity an activity, a movement, a transition from one moment/place to another. In a sense we co-produce her installation as we develop a personal investigation based on participation and sensation, the total experience involving both physical and mental activity.

• Kim's installation has an energy and drama - the blackened room, blowing fabric and lighting on the colourful cloth-which ensures a dynamic poetics. She sets into motion a dialogue by opening up a space and inviting us to take part in various outlooks or positions. We are impelled to move physically, mentally or critically and emotionally - past the coloured textiles. The unfolding theatre of the installation impinges on our space of lived social experience and thoughtfully reveals the restrictive nature of a mostly silent and ignored female activity. Whether it is a clothesline in Seoul - or even Oakville - her quiet ironies become an effective tool to expose and invert the value-laden divisions between feminine and masculine, high art and every- day life. It is in the activities of the everyday life of Korean women that Kim creates new assertions for a heightened awareness and a re-examination of their labours.