Kimsooja

Kimsooja is a South Korean, multi-disciplinary conceptual artist who works with a variety of different media to provide some form of cultural, anthropological, feminist, and humanist commentary in her works. She uses her art as a medium to mitigate her relationship with the world, in a time that is highly divisive and unpredictable. 

Being someone who is often concerned with ideas of culture and representation in my own artistic practice, I was highly intrigued with Kimsooja’s use of the bottari or the symbol of the bottari in her works. She uses this cloth and plays with different ways of wrapping it as a means through which she integrates the lives of different people along different periods of time. I find this quite an interesting method through which to explore time and personal history as not only is she interweaving a trans-generational cultural tradition into her art, she is also using it to act as a symbol of the same idea, connecting people and their stories across time.

Additionally, another one of Kimsooja’s works that most intrigued me was Archive of Mind (Fig 1), as she incorporates both cultural elements, as well as this interaction between materiality and the progression of time. Firstly, she describes this work as another bottari as she notes that in this interactive work, she asks her audience to wrap the clay in their palms like one would wrap the cloth of a bottari. I found this an interesting allusion to her reasoning for beginning to experiment with video art, as she believed it was another medium through which she could “wrap her experiences with nature”. In this way, I find this recurring metaphor of “wrapping” to be powerful, as it is the mode through which she finds ways to connect every project of hers with a cultural idea and process. Moreover, her experimentation with materiality and how she notes that she wants her audience to experience the transcendent moment when they stop feeling the cold softness of the clay and instead the “material becomes a void through which they enter their own space of mind” is closely linked to the notion of time in this work. I believe there are two parallel explorations of this concept, as not only is she using the clay as a mode through which every member of the audience enters their own separate, individual timeline of thoughts and memories, but also the collective act of doing so – of reflecting on the passage of time as time itself progresses – is what creates the artwork in the first place (in some ways I think this subverts our preconceptions of what creative process is and what it looks like).

Finally, Kimsooja’s Archive of Mind to me, is most reminiscent of Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project at the Tate Modern Turbine Hall (arguably one of my favorite works of installation art). In short, this work is an entirely artificial representation of the sun made from mono-frequency lights, projection foil, haze machines, mirror foil, aluminium, and scaffolding (Fig 2), and is an ode to the ubiquitous subject of weather through which Eliasson explores notions of experience, mediation and representation. He constructs this installation without any desire to realistically simulate the visuals of the sun in the sky, to ensure that his audience is explicitly able to comprehend that this is a manufactured presentation of nature. Throughout the duration of the installation, viewers were encouraged to enter the Turbine Hall and freely express themselves, following their own whims and fancies as to how to behave and interact with the work. In essence, it was meant to evoke a spontaneous response (which Eliasson succeeded in doing as seen in Fig 3 and Fig 4).

While The Weather Project does not have the kind of cultural associations that one can make in Kimsooja’s work, what strikes me as similar is that both artists intentionally want their audiences to recognize the moment of transcendence, and to be aware that they are having an “experience” in an environment that is manufactured for them, and that in some way, they too contribute to. I think the concept of creating a kind of meta-experience for the audience is one that is highly difficult to both comprehend and accomplish, therefore I think there is much to appreciate in these works about how time and public engagement come together to create a unique narrative around an artwork and how this can lead to an evolution of its meaning.

Provided References:
Kimsooja

Work from:
29th Oct 2020 – Daily Vitamins Assignment
Time with Professor Mike Rader