The Needle Woman
The Needle Woman series comprises eight silent videos that each lasts six minutes and thirty-three seconds. There is no known reason behind the exact length, but the concepts of time and the passing of it were certainly crucial to Kimsooja. They each loop continuously and are displayed on screens next to each other on the walls of a dark room.[132] Keiji Nakamura explains that in the Needle Woman, “by synchronizing with natural time, she seems to have grasped her own inner time. So that, ultimately, viewer time also merges with her take on cosmic time.”[133] The continuity of a looped video is comparable to the continuity of life and death, and how important that is in Kimsooja’s work focusing on a meditative state. The audience of any of the films would be watching this, not knowing exactly when it ends and restarts. As for the time Kimsooja stood in each city, she stated in an interview with Mary Jane Jacob in 2003 that each performance lasted twenty-five to thirty minutes.[134] The Needle Woman performance was first exhibited at a solo exhibition at PS1 in 2001. The eight videos were projected simultaneously on the four walls of a room. The billboard-size format allowed the viewers to participate and immerse themselves in the video actively. This exhibition created a face-to-face exhibition, with a life-size Kimsooja standing before each visitor (Fig. 29.5).[135] The video to the right is a compilation of Kimsooja’s Needle Woman series.
The eight cities that this series highlights are Delhi (India), Lagos (Nigeria), Tokyo (Japan), Mexico City (Mexico), New York (U.S.A.), London (England), Shanghai (China), and Cairo (Egypt).[136] In 2005, the Needle Woman continued in new cities, Patan (Nepal), Jerusalem (Israel), Sana’a (Yemen), Havana (Cuba), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), N’Djamena (Chad), with six new video performances. She chooses not to film a video in Korea because she wants to distance herself from her identity.[137] Kimsooja stands unmoving in the middle of each video while the city buzzes around her. Whether in India, Nigeria, Japan, Mexico, the U.S.A, England, China, or Egypt, Kimsooja sticks out like a haystack. Regardless of the bustling city and its inhabitants, Kimsooja is the anchor that holds you still. She is the centerpiece. Her dark shape and lack of movement invite you to focus solely on her or see right through her. Once we look at an unmoving object long enough, we begin to ignore it or focus on everything else around it. As the “Needle Woman,” Kimsooja chooses her locations based on places where she cannot escape her otherness.[138] This comes from a place of always feeling out of place. Like Mori, Kimsooja was certainly experiencing the global world of contemporary art, However, Kimsooja didn’t get to experience it at such an early age, including in her education. Her feelings of otherness were strong, and she engaged with them head-on in her art. The videos are shot from the busiest streets in the world’s most populous and sometimes dangerous cities. [139] As the “Needle Woman,” or the needle in the case of sewing, she weaves her persona “into the fabric of matter.”[140] In every video, Kimsooja is dressed in a neutral grey shirt. A few different things can explain the reasoning for this. First and most literally, she is meant to represent a needle. Needles are typically silver/grey. Were Kimsooja to dress in one of her woven fabric creations, the message wouldn’t be the same. These woven creations can be seen in Encounter – Looking into Sewing (Fig. 30) or Deductive Object VII (Fig. 31), where the figure is covered in these same fabrics. In her other most famous series, Cities on the Move – 2727 kilometers Bottari Truck from 1997, you can see the same bright fabric, a swath of pink, green, gold and red, but instead of Kimsooja wearing it, she is sitting on top of it. Dark, neutral clothing isn’t exclusive to Needle Woman, often for the exact purpose of making more complex relationships in her work, setting a stark contrast between simple and bold, light, and dark. Her plain outfit is the same in A Homeless Woman and A Beggar Woman. The Needle Woman and the other ‘Woman’ performances highlight Kimsooja, not the fabric she is wearing. The neutral clothing contrasts the hectic city to the perfectly still “needle,” Kimsooja. The neutrality of her outfit contrasts with the constant stimuli of the city.[141] That is, the grey outfit allows Kimsooja to go unnoticed, but it also makes her stand out even more.
In analyzing Kimsooja’s presence in the Needle Woman, the lack of features and the figure’s simplicity make her both unrecognizable and distinctly foreign simultaneously. She attracts little attention from those around her in most cases, where hybrids are common and there are people of all origins. However, while the stimuli of the city are what would typically grab our attention, the mysterious identity of the woman at the center is even more stimulating.[142] What does her face look like? Is she making an expression on her face? Is she smiling? What are the bystanders seeing when they pass her? Are they making eye contact? Are they learning something about her identity that we, as later viewers, can’t see? Therefore, Kimsooja is both protecting her identity and making herself more vulnerable with her back exposed to the viewer. She is unguarded, an easy target without her sight. However, she is protected with no signs of her identity or individuality. There is no way to objectify her body because she doesn’t let us see her.[143] Her value of independence and freedom from societal pressures of being a woman and fixed stereotyping are suddenly very clear.[144]There are no female features present besides her long ponytail and no features indicating that she may be Korean. She is essentially a shell, a portal, a keyhole. Her modesty is also part of Kimsooja’s Korean identity, which we will explore later in this chapter.
The artist’s back, as described by scholar Julia Zugazagoiti, allows us to pass through the work and into the cities shown to us. This illustrates the Kantian definition of the sublime: “to feel an emotion through the devices the artist offers us as she opens up her own experience so that we can enter into it without risk or peril.”[145] This is signaling certain kinds of bodily threats that we, the viewer, are shielded from, but that she, the figure is perhaps not. We are vicariously participating in this experience of space through her. Because of the nature of endurance or performance art, we come in much later in the life of the art. Kimsooja took on this psychological, physical, intimate, and personal form of meditation so that we, as viewers, could experience and perceive it through the keyhole that is her body.[146] But we are protected from any bodily threats that could’ve come her way. Like any art, the series and videos can have as much or as little meaning to you as you let them. The viewer can imagine themselves in Kimsooja’s shoes, taking her place in the city she stands in, or they can observe from afar. The Needle Woman is for a global community, creating a very different meaning for different parts of that community depending on where you are from. If you are from a bustling metropolis, you may find it easier to enter the scene that Kimsooja records from the streets of New York City. You may understand the atmosphere and feel more comfortable or even recognize those surroundings. Of course, there are also viewers inside the videos. We can consider them as part of the art themselves or as viewers in their own right. Depending on the country in which she was filming, people reacted differently to watching Kimsooja film in the middle of their city. The series was meant to represent the interaction between self and others. Kimsooja conceived this project as “invisible sewing.”[147] In a museum setting, Kimsooja becomes the mediator between the people in the video and the viewers at the museum. She invites her viewers to share her meditative experience, so people from different cultures watch and meet people like she does when she’s there.[148]
Kimsooja wanted the viewer to slow down in both settings. Either in person on the sidewalk where they see her, or from afar at the gallery where they see the recording. The passage of time and the motion of reflection are important to her. In an interview with Barbara Matilsky in 2003, Kimsooja describes her own vision for these back-facing works. She invites the viewer to share her own meditative experience. She explains, “That is why my body is facing against the viewer. Look at what I look at. I do not present my ego, my identity.” She desires the viewers to “wear” her body. This suggests the idea of the artist as mediator “to open possibilities for other people to participate in a ‘certain awareness and awakening.’”[149] She looks at it as a chance for people to bring their daily life to a halt and achieve a more concentrated state of mind.[150]
In the in-person display, the pedestrians in certain cities reacted differently to Kimsooja than in other cities. It is busy in Tokyo, a very well-developed modern city. Some people cast glances at her, smiling, wondering, or glowering. The one’s that stop to look eventually pass her by after a couple of seconds. There are young people with brightly colored hair, people wearing clothes with colors that stand out compared to Kimsooja’s outfit, and people who talk on their cell phones.[151] Tokyo is an example of one of the modern cities in this series. The people in Tokyo, London, and New York are characterized by their rapid and determined pace. They are unphased, scarcely noticing the artist at all. In these exceptionally modern and cosmopolitan cities, racial differences fade. The few features of her that we can see do not put her out of place. However, the Japanese would be rather familiar with this kind of religious acting in their society. Therefore, Tokyo wouldn’t only be unphased by Kimsooja’s performance because of the city’s rate of modernization but because of their spiritual traditions and values. They may have seen something like this before.
On the other hand, Cairo, Delhi, Mexico, and Lagos are on the other end of the spectrum. There is an evident tension between the modern and the traditional. This makes the presence of Kimsooja uncomfortable. The individuals of these societies are more attentive to those around them, evaluating their position or rank within conventional hierarchies and social classes that are essential to their culture. The members of different social classes mix in the street and are wary of each other. While they coexist in the street, the distinctions are tangible.[152] The tension is palpable in these cities in various ways. Most notably in Delhi, India, where we have traveled back in time.Although visually, Kimsooja blends in because of her neutral and simple outfit, the city is quite exotic and her being there is not something the people of Delhi expected. Her East Asian appearance is foreign to them. Making her stand out in their community. Most people turn their heads to see her as they pass by. Although a hodgepodge of social classes, workers, women, or people riding carriage-style transportation, Kimsooja doesn’t look like them, enough to become a spectacle to the community.[153] In some cases, depending on the culture, seeing a woman on the street going against the grain might be a shocking or modern sight to traditional communities.
The Needle Woman series and how it fits into the genre of performance art is essential to how we understand Kimsooja’s work. We see the temporality and ephemerality of performance art in the Needle Woman; however, the series also falls into video art and installation. Although Kimsooja did perform these scenes in which she stands in the middle of crowded streets, and that performance took the risk of uncertainty in each city and its people, she also recorded them as video art in itself. For most performance art, there’s not always footage or physical proof that the performance took place. Sometimes it’s a singular photograph, or sometimes it’s by word of mouth. Performance art, significantly earlier on in the contemporary period, often followed the phrase “you just had to be there.” There’s the difficulty of performance art in scholarship and talking about something that is so under-documented and ephemeral. However, the beauty of performance art is that it disappears into the ether.
Unlike disappearing into the ether, Kimsooja makes sure that the afterlife of her work endures. The Needle Woman is recorded by Kimsooja, based on the height of the camera being even with her height, a video camera attached to a tripod, or a person. It is in this way that Kimsooja’s performance art differs from others. She is in control of the recording of her performance. Although the audience, in this case, the city in which she stands, can be unpredictable, the recording and the video are on her side. Unlike Shigeko Kubota’s Vagina Painting performance from 1965 where there were 10 viewers and one man taking photos, Kimsooja was performing and creating art simultaneously. Where Kubota has maybe two images of her famous performance, Kimsooja has twelve 6-plus minute-long videos to work with. The dimension of ephemerality is different and not as extreme. Kimsooja also benefits from being her own camera man. She maintains control over these videos and images, adding a level of self-possession that Kubota did not have.