Before the Needle Woman

Born into a sensitive military family in Daegu, South Korea, in 1957, Kimsooja moved many times around the country in her childhood.[115] Nearly every two years, she traveled with her family from one military zone to the next, specifically D.M.Z., Demilitarized Zone areas. She credits her Bottari Cities on the Move and Needle Woman projects to her family situation and her constant moving as a child.[116] It doesn’t come as a surprise that this constant moving would establish her interest in the impermanency of existence that is evident in her future works, for example, the impermanency of performance art.[117] Kimsooja grew up a Catholic practicing Christianity. However, the mix of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Shamanism was still a large part of Korean daily life.[118] Much of her work explores the conflict between Confucianist society and individuals, particularly women.[119] She describes her spiritual background as complex, being informed by Buddhism and Catholicism, as well as having a “code of moral conduct influenced by Confucianism.” Although she stepped out of organized religion following high school and did not practice Buddhism formally, Kimsooja’s personal practices and beliefs strongly correspond to the Buddhist philosophy of life. She stepped away from religion to experience the real world, feeling uncomfortable with “the systemization of beliefs and behavior within faith traditions.” In many of her works, including a Needle Woman, you can see her awakening and the complexity of spirituality through the themes of meditation, mindfulness, and the elements of mundane lives.[120]

Although her father was in the military, Kimsooja’s two brothers and her mother were musicians, likely fueling her interest in the arts she claimed started when she was just a little girl. She dreamt of becoming an artist, studied drawing, and eventually received a master’s degree in fine arts from Hong-Ik University in Seoul. This institution nurtures many modern and contemporary Korean artists. The artist then took a global path. From 1984 to 1985, Kimsooja traveled to Paris to study lithography at Ecole National Superieure des Beaux-Arts. She became an Artist in Residence at MoMA P.S1. from 1992 to 1993 and a World Views Artist in Residence at the World Trade Center in New York from 1998 to 1999, when she worked on the Needle Woman series. She currently lives and works in New York.[121]

Before she set out to the eight cities around the globe where Needle Woman was produced, Kimsooja had already created works indicating her interest in movement and impermanent life, such as Cities on the Move – 2727 kilometers Bottari Truck in 1997 (Fig. 27). In this piece, Kimsooja documented an 11-day trip throughout Korea with a truck loaded up with “bottari,” a fabric made domestically by Korean women and used to carry objects from city to city during the Korean War. She visited places on this route where she used to live or has memories.[122] After Cities on the Move, Kimsooja produces several of these series. Between 2000 and 2001, Kimsooja produced a few series that were similar in names, such as A Homeless Woman, filmed in Cairo and Delhi (Fig. 28), and A Beggar Woman, filmed in Cairo, Lagos, and Mexico City (Fig. 29).[123] These both take the form of video performances, in which the artist either lays or sits in one position, allowing the world and its inhabitants to whirl past her. These video performances weren’t just similar in names. They emphasize publicity, stillness, the endurance of gaze, and anonymity of showing the artist’s back in the film and costume. Additionally, she produced A Mirror Woman, A Laundry Woman, A Lighthouse Woman, and A Wind Woman. Most of her work is made up of series, but she also has work that stands on its own. Those three years between Cities on the Move and A Needle Woman are paramount to understanding what became a monumental theme in Kimsooja’s career: the woman and the many forms she takes. This chapter focuses on the Needle Womanbecause of its repetition and the space it takes up in Kimsooja’s oeuvre. In scrolling through her website, filled with series after series, the most alluring were the lists of cities and the videos that accompanied them. Without reading too much into it, they all looked somewhat similar. The Needle Woman differs from the other series in its vastness. Each episode tells a different story that looks vaguely similar on the outside. With its vastness, the Needle Woman also has Kimsooja and her own body standing still at the center of each episode. The other series either have Kimsooja sitting down in maybe two or three episodes or focus on a lighthouse rather than a human body. The Needle Woman centers the body at its heart, and that’s what makes it unique and what makes it an excellent match for Mariko Mori’s “Esoteric Cosmos.”