Views of a “Korean” “Woman”
“Korean”
Kimsooja’s identity as a Korean woman artist is often what defines her. The existing scholarship surrounding Kimsooja addresses her Korean identity, comparing her to other Korean woman artists and examining how this identity affects her art, both the creation and interpretation of it. As a result, there is a standard formula for analyzing her work that begins with phrases like “against the backdrop of her experiences as a Korean…” and continues with an explanation.[124] Esther Kho focuses on Kimsooja’s relationship with her family, her tradition, and Korea in general, exploring how her work experiences differed based on specific audiences. Kho’s study puts Kimsooja in line with two other Korean artists to explore the meanings and qualities of three contemporary Korean border-crossing artists.[125] Her identity, as both a Korean and a woman is used together in many pieces of scholarship, such as Jooeun Lee’s “Sooja Kim’s Wrapping Cloth: The Aesthetics of Paradox,” to show how she is breaking the traditional Korean woman’s role in society. Specifically, her “bottari” fabric works are linked to the “uniquely feminine lyric and tactile sensitivity” that sewing and textiles typically represent.[126] At the same time, in the same argument, the fabric is representative or interpreted as “the destiny of Koreans who must carry the past of their people wrapped inside them wherever they go.”[127] Her fabric works are inherently feminist and Korean at the same time.
In terms of her Korean identity, much like Mori’s Japanese identity, scholars focus on how she mixes and remixes cultures in her art, establishing a more universal or globalized theme.[128] Kimsooja changed her name from two words, “Kim Sooja,” to one, “Kimsooja,”” because without a space, the name provides few hints of her marital status, nationality, family origin, or religious affiliation. In America, she explained, women took their husbands’ names when they married. Combining her first and family names, she erased the differences or boundaries between marital status and nationality. She rejected the social pressure in society of what it meant to be a woman, what it meant to be married or not, and what it meant to take a particular name.[129] In doing so, she also rejected her Korean identity and being solely identified based on that. Scholars describe the way she uses all these “ingredients,” such as the binaries of religion versus tradition, contemporary versus historical, and East versus West, in her art to create this effect. These dualities or binaries, as listed above, are embraced by a Buddhist-derived stance and resonate in Buddhist practice. Many contemporary Asian artists play with dualities throughout their art, but here we emphasize the Buddhist practice because Kimsooja incorporates Buddhism and spirituality into so much of her art.
“Woman”
The other label on Kimsooja’s art is her gender. Although Kimsooja denies being a feminist or a nationalist, both categories stick to her in scholarship. The scholars interested in the feminist aspects of Kimsooja are more concerned with her other pieces that incorporate materials like cloth and textiles and the traditions of sewing among Korean women, explicitly the use of textiles with femininity and putting that in the same vein as many Western feminist works.[130] Jooeun Lee attempts to establish a connection between Korean feminism and Western feminism, which I will also examine in the next sections. The brunt of scholarship on Asian women artists like Kimsooja is differentiating between their form of feminism and how they incorporate it versus Europe or contemporary American feminism. The scholarship on Kimsooja and feminism can be applied to Needle Woman because of the ideas of making the private non-private, leaving home, and always keeping her back to us, not allowing anyone to gaze upon her face.[131] Like Jooeun argues, Kimsooja’s works aren’t just feminist for their materials but for the way she uses those materials. Although the Needle Woman does not involve fabric, sewing, or other forms of material expression associated with feminism, it stands it’s ground as a highlight of her entire oeuvre. This scholarship helps advance my investigation into the Needle Woman as a performance piece and how she uses her body critically.
“Spiritual” + “Performance/Endurance Art”
The final group of scholarship on Kimsooja explores ideas of spirituality. Thierry Raspail, Jean-Hubert Martin, and Bernard Fibicher touch upon the spiritual journey and the human condition that Kimsooja incorporates into her work, especially the Needle Woman. Her body and her surroundings, or nature in some instances, are bound to one another and become one. The other focus of scholarship on Kimsooja is on the categorization of the Needle Woman as endurance art, for example, how she stands in the middle of a crowd for long periods without moving. Performance art is included under this subheading; however, Kimsooja’s art as a performance is only mentioned in passing as a simple categorizing term, perhaps the result of performance art a relatively new genre in contemporary Asian art.. Mixed with the fact that Kimsooja is an Asian woman, the performance art category makes her even more niche because of its relatively newness. A perplexing aspect of the Needle Woman series is that it isn’t written about very much, but in the existing scholarship, ideas about Kimsooja, feminism, nationality, identity, and spirituality are all present to make connections, and they are all visible in this series.