[KIMSOOJA] In this video, I'm facing the nature,
and behind is the human watching me.
My arm is totally outstretched onto the nature.
My desire is abandoned, and my will is abandoned.
With that duration of performance,
I experience a certain transcendence
of myself,
and hopefully audience does too.
I was, in the beginning,
thinking of doing kind of a walking performance,
but I didn't know exactly where and how.
So we just walked around the
city more than an hour, just walking and walking
and walking, and then I arrived to Shibuya area, where so many
people were passing by. and I was totally overwhelmed
by the crowds around me, and my body was full of energy
accumulated by this walking and thinking of people.
So at that moment, I aware the– the distinction between my body
and the crowd in the street, and I had to stop there.
I just couldn't walk anymore. I had to stop there.
My first video using my own body
as a symbolic needle was "A Needle Woman" in Tokyo, '99.
That is like– almost like
putting, inserting, a needle onto the earth, in a way.
And that's more about my energy I had at the time.
My system is very much rooted to
the practice of sewing, that uses the needle onto fabric.
I came to a conclusion that I can be a needle woman.
[laughs]
I'm using the pedestrians passing moment as slow motion,
as if they are weaved through my body as a needle.
It's not about showing my identity,
so it should be from behind, not to show my face.
The camera lens is my eyes, that
sees my back,
that sees the other people in front of me.
So there is three different perspectives in my Needle Woman performances.
My work, in a way, has never
been completed as a single piece, I think.
I've thought always my work is in transition,
always in process. I can ever really finalize,
"This is completed," or, "This is finished."
Whenever I have a new question, I would always like to continue
and see through different perspective.
In Korea, we lived in a house with a straw roof and very cold.
It was really, really cold. And even though we had a stove
in the room, when I woke up in the morning, there was frost all
over on the wall around the room, and I'd been scratching
on top of it, making, like, lines and drawings on it.
Maybe that's my first drawing piece.
[chuckles]
I always discover artistic questions and answers from our
daily life activities.
"Bottari" was one of them.
Bottari in Korean means "Bundle."
Usually we carry it whenever we have precious things to keep.
When I first discovered
bottari as a three-dimensional sculpture, it was at P.S.1 Studio,
when I looked back and there was a bottari, which
I made but didn't realize before, because I'd been always
having these bottaris
to stack and to keep fabrics in it. And that bottari
looked totally different from the ones before.
When I first discover bottari in different formalistic way of sculpture,
I started those for some time, like a couple of years.
Then when I returned to Korea, where the bottari is our reality,
I started seeing them in a different way,
which is more realistic way.
A bottari that is more social-, cultural-related object rather than formalistic sculpture.
I didn't realize until I did this "Cities on the Move" Bottari Truck Performance,
how actually my bottaris are very much rooted to my family history.
We were always on the road.
My father, because of the Korean War, he had to go to military,
and then he stayed in military service.
We always had to move.
So it's part of our family
history that had a little bit of a nomadic life.
"Laundry Woman" installation with Tibetan monk chant...
that examine the audience's body
as a needle that weaves through the laundry field.
I use used bedcovers from newly
married couples that has all the symbols and embroideries
of all wishes we want to carry in our lives,
Such as long life, love, peace, and fertility.
[faint chanted music playing]
I was invited to create
a new set-specific project in Brussels.
As a perfect installation for that space, I thought of
"Lotus: Zone of Zero."
The sound you hear in this piece
is a mixture of Tibetan monk chant, Gregorian chant,
and Islamic chant.
Zone of Zero is a central location where
the audience perceives the three different
religious chants merged together.
[merged chanted music playing]
I used Buddhist lotus-shape lanterns in it.
There is a train station connected to the space,
so many people walking by, you know, through every day,
in the morning and coming back in the evening.
So it's like a repeated ceremony of peace for them.
I saw the crystal palace a few years before.
And I was really struck by the beauty of that structure,
and I wanted to do something. and I started thinking:
"This space should be empty, and use it as space itself."
By not really creating something physical inside, but putting
diffraction grating film that defuses the light into rainbow spectrum,
and then put mirror all over the
floor that reflects the whole structure of the Crystal Palace.
People are invited to this space that is filled with my breathing sound in it.
Breathing in and out is another
way of weaving and another way of sewing.
I see the crystal palace piece as a bottari of light and sound
and reflection.
I always try to find a transcendent moment in space within my work.
My intention is to reach to the totality of our life and in art.
So that's always one reason my practice is quite broad
and diverse: to reach that complexity
and comprehensiveness.
I don't know in the end
where I could reach, but I would like to get to
that comprehensive totality in my work.
[the sound of one person Inhaling and exhaling playing]
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