Kimsooja

Kimsooja
A Laundry Woman video still; Yamuna River, India, 2000
Born	Gim Su-ja 1957 (age 59–60) Daegu, South Korea
Nationality	South Korean
Education	Hongik University
Known for	Conceptual and performance art
Korean name
Hangul	김수자
Revised Romanization	Gim Suja
McCune–Reischauer	Kim Suja

Kimsooja (Hangul: 김수자; born 1957) is a South Korean multi-disciplinary conceptual artist based in New York, Paris and Seoul. She represented Korea for the 24th São Paulo Biennale in 1998 and the 55th Venice Biennale Korean Pavilion in 2013, and participated in more than 30 international biennials and triennials. She has had solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1; Cristal Palace, Reina Sofia; the Vancouver Art Gallery; Kunsthalle Wien; Kunsthalle Bern; Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein; Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, UK; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Padliglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan; Museum of Contemporary Art Lyon; Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf; Musée d’Art Moderne Saint-Étienne; The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; PAC Milan; Daegu Art Museum; ICC Tokyo; CCA Kitakyushu; the Plateau Samsung Museum, Seoul; Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain; Centre Pompidou Metz, France.

After having to pick a domain name for her website, Kimsooja thought about the conceptual implications of combining her name into one word. One word names do not ascribe gender identity, marital status, or cultural identity because there is no separating between the first name and family name. She commemorated this act in a conceptual piece titled A One-Word Name Is An Anarchist's Name (2003).

Kimsooja was born in Daegu, South Korea, in 1957. She studied Western painting at the Hongik University in Seoul, and her origin as a painter was a crucial starting point for the development of her art. Kimsooja's "Sewing" series (1983–1992), her first work with fabric, brought forth an assemblage of fabric forming cruciform structures that synthesized an entangled and knotted vision of the world into a system of horizontals and verticals. Like the Spatialist painter Lucio Fontana who pierced the uni-colored canvas with a sharped-edged dagger, Kimsooja also made art that was no longer a screen of illusion but a three-dimensional structure as she weaved through the surface of the work, piercing holes into it.

Subsequent to a residency at PS1: MOMA in 1992-93, Kimsooja initiated a series of site-specific installations that found their origin in the Korean color spectrum (Obangsaek). She created sculptures inspired from Korean bedcover cloth bundles that are associated in Korean culture with travel and migration, and may also be interpreted in her work as an allusion to restrictions on female activities. These bedcover bundles inspired the title of a number of sculptures and installation works that Kimsooja titled after the Korean word Bottari, that intimates the idea of travels, but also refers to concepts of wrapping, and unfolding.