Title

Kimsooja: Sewing into walking.

Venues

Art Gallery of Western Australia. (17 February 2018 – 21 May 2018)

Date

(2018)

Summary

Single-artist exhibition. Located: Australia (WA). Multi-media installation

Documentation

Sewing into walking by Korean artist Kimsooja is a major highlight of the Gallery’s holdings of contemporary international art. The work is comprised of bundles of clothes and sewn cloth, a large-scale projection and a stack of three monitors. This showing at AGWA twins with her solo presentation at the Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts for the Perth International Arts Festival. The mid-1990s multi-media installation extends reflects her long term interest in the use of fabric as an exploration of the personal, spiritual and political dimension of clothes and textiles. In her hands, these are intimate mediums that carry the traces of the bodies that have worn them, speaking about the physical and psychological need for shelter, and the scents and memories that continue to animate them. Honouring her cultural background, Kimsooja’s bundles are derived from Korean bottari, the bundling of clothes that allows them to be moved from place to place and between homes, and this element of the work. About KiMsooja Kimsooja was born in 1957 in Daegu, Korea (a large city south east of the capital Seoul). She studied in the painting department at the Hong-IK University in Seoul from 1980, and then at the lithography studio, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-arts, in Paris. Since 1988, she has exhibited extensively internationally and work is included in many of the major international public collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Fukuoka Art Museum, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Los Angeles County Museum of art, and Museum of Modern Art, St. Etienne, France, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea. A formative experience was as artist-in-residence at MoMA P.S.1 in New York from 1992-1993. Kimsooja currently lives and works between New York, United States of America, and Seoul, South Korea. [Gallery media]

Countries of context

Australia | South Korea