Screen Space – Kimsooja

Kimsooja Sewing into walking
Kimsooja Sewing into walking

Kimsooja Sewing into walking 1994-1998 (detail still). Installation with used clothing, bedcovers, three channel video, three monitors and projection Magno video discs parts I, II, III, edition 1/2, various dimensions. State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased 1998.

Kimsooja Sewing into walking 1994-1998
Kimsooja Sewing into walking 1994-1998

Kimsooja Sewing into walking 1994-1998 (detail still). Installation with used clothing, bedcovers, three channel video, three monitors and projection Magno video discs parts I, II, III, edition 1/2, various dimensions. State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased 1998.

Screen Space – Kimsooja

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.

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Curated by

Dunja Rmandić
AGWA Associate Curator of 21st Century Arts

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About the artist

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.

On Saturday 27 August, the Gallery is open 10am-3pm only as we prepare for the AGWA Foundation Gala supporting women in the arts. Some exhibition access will be disrupted with two Tracks We Share ground floor galleries closed. AGWA Rooftop bar will be closed, reopening at 2pm Sunday. Details