DUSSELDORF.- ‘Conditions of Humanity’ is Kim Sooja’s (*1957 in Taegu, South Korea) first major individual exhibition in Germany. The artist, who has lived and worked in New York since 1998, studied painting in Seoul and Paris. Her works, which have a poetic and at the same time contemplative nature, are created against the cultural background of her Korean origin and a large number of them pick out the subject of being human in a globalised world as a central theme. Kim Sooja’s exhibition at museum kunst palast was conceived in co-operation with the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon and includes several video installations as well as the large room installation A Laundry Woman (2000), which may be entered by the visitor.
The installation consists of a multitude of large and colourful traditional Korean bedcovers pinned to thin ropes strung across the room as if hung up to dry. The vividness of the individual sheets, which are richly ornamented with symbolic embroidery, expands in the spatial, environmental presentation to an enthralling blaze of colour. The visitor is invited to move among the softly swaying fabrics and, through the closeness and tangibility, to experience both the beauty and delicateness of these cloths. While in the artistic installation the cloths can be experienced primarily as aesthetic and symbolic elements, in Korea they serve mainly as useful material, as a basis for the resting, sleeping, loving and dead body.
In A Laundry Woman, the traditional Korean fabric sewn up as sheets and cloths represents a crucial element of Kim Sooja’s artistic work, while in her video work A Needle Woman (1999-2001), the artist herself acts like the tip of a needle. Motionless and rigid, she positions herself facing the thronging masses of people in metropolises such as Shanghai, Tokio, New York or New Delhi and thus compels the pouring stream of passers-by to flow past and around her. As in the video the artist presents herself from the rear, the viewer is able to look directly at the people’s faces with all their different reactions.
“It is the point of the needle which penetrates the fabric, and we cannot two different parts of the fabrics with threads, through the eye of the needle. A needle is an extension of the body, and a thread is an extension of the mind. The traces of the mind always remain in the fabric, but the needle leaves the site when its medialization is complete. The needle is medium, mystery, reality, hermaphrodite, barometer, a moment, and a Zen.” (Kim Sooja)
Kim Sooja’s activities in terms of travels and exhibitions can thus be understood as her constantly weaving new relations.
In a different work of the video series A Needle Woman, 1999, Kim Sooja lies alone on a rock in the mountains near Kitakyushu in Japan and outlines, motionless, the contour of the rock. While clouds pass, the cosmic dimensions and one’s own finiteness becomes apparent. Kim Sooja: “The impermanence of our lives is an important notion in my work. With this perception comes a deeper compassion for human beings.” (Kim Sooja).
