"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.