● MMCA presents the exhibition, 《MMCA HYUNDAI MOTOR SERIES 2016:
KIMSOOJA / ARCHIVE OF MIND》sponsored by Hyundai Motor Company
● SelectedKimsooja as Korea’s representative contemporary artist
- presents nine artworks with site-specific installation and video
- from July 27, 2016 to February 5, 2017 at MMCA Seoul
The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA; Director Bartomeu Mari) presents the exhibition, 《MMCA HYUNDAI MOTOR SERIES 2016: KIMSOOJA - Archive of Mind》as the 3rd exhibition of Hyundai Motor Series from July 27, 2016 through February 5, 2017 at MMCA Seoul.
MMCA HYUNDAI MOTOR SERIES is the museum’s 10-year long program implemented in collaboration with Hyundai Motor Company since 2014 to support the solo exhibition of prominent Korean artists. By providing distinguished artists with distinctive art practices the opportunity to realize extensive new works, the program instills new possibilities into the field of contemporary Korean art.
MMCA HYUNDAI MOTOR SERIES 2016: KIMSOOJA presents 9 pieces of work by the invited artist Kimsooja(b. 1957~) in Archive of Mind. Addressing existential issues of self and others, Kimsooja's work spans site-specific installation, performance, video and photography using sound, light and daily objects. With the gaze of a mirror and a needle that reveals and brings us to an awareness of self, Kimsooja investigates questions concerning the conditions of humanity, while engaging politics, environment and various issues that we are facing in this era. Kimsooja brings together art and life through a conceptual and structural investigation of materiality/immateriality, mobility/immobility, in a manner of non-making and non-doing, which inverts the notion of the artist as the predominant actor.
For the last 30 years, Kimsooja has worked on an ever-evolving tableau, a continuation of the artist’s early work with painting and re-contextualizing daily objects, actions, and urgent social issues such as migration, exile, and violence. The works presented at MMCA further her commitment to creating an encounter with the public and continue the artist’s early meditation on non-doing and non-making as a form of art practice. Kimsooja’s enduring examination of dualism in life and art transforms elementsof performance into a pursuit of totality.
The project will bring together nine pieces to present an overview of her artistic realm and will serve as an impetus for the artist to seek a meaningful shift in her practice. It will also provide viewers with a forum where they reflect on life and the art of our generation through their engagement and communication.
□ General Inquiries: Tel. +82-2-3701-9500 (MMCA Seoul)
For details on the materials, please contact Park Young-ran, Senior Curator at Exhibition Team 1 of MMCA (Tel. +82-2-3701-9551, email. ).
Artworks
1. Archive of Mind, 2016, participatory site specific installation consisting of clay spheres, 19 m elliptical wooden table, with sound performance Unfolding Sphere, 2016, 15’31”.
2.Unfolding Sphere, 2016, 16-channel clay ball rolling and gargling sound performance by the artist, total 15 min 31 sec.
Archive of Mindis a participatory workshop which invites the audience to form a lump of clay into spheres on a 19-meter-long elliptical wooden table. Being performed for the first time at MMCA, this installation invites the audience to roll “clay balls” and lay them to dry on the table, set to a sound performance of clay being rolled into balls and the artist gargling. This new sound performance titled Unfolding Sphere is an acoustic counterpart to the rhythmic constellation of the clay spheres. Kimsooja conceived of making clay spheres as a conceptual and meditative practice, inspired by the artist’s earlier concept of Bottari as a method of wrapping. The repetitive act of rolling clay introduces polarity between symmetrical forces of the participants' palms, transposing their state of mind into matter and matter into void.
3. Geometry of Body, 2006 – 2015, artist’s yoga mat, 185 x 63.5 cm
Geometry of Body is the artist's yoga mat which she has used since 2006. Embedded with the traces of the artist’s hands and feet and the invisible dimensions of her bodily movements and gravity during yoga, this work demonstrates the artist’s strong on-going fascination with the idea of the body.
4. A Study on Body, 1981, a series of five silkscreen prints on paper based on the artist performance photos, 54.5 x 55.5 cm
This silk screen work is Kimsooja’s early 80’s experimentation on body as geographic form in space, combining her performative action documented in photography using serigraphy. The piece provides the basic concept of the vertical and horizontal configuration consistently apparent in the artist’s historical, social and culturally associated projects such as Bottari,Bottari Truck, A Needle Woman, and Yoga Mat.
5. One Breath, 2004 / 2016, digitalembroideryonsatin, abstract from The Weaving Factory sound performance by the artist, 2004, 180 x 61 cm
One Breath is the first digital embroidery piece Kimsooja made since she stopped applying sewing to her work in 1992. Embroidering one segment of the sound waves of the artist’s breath in her performance The Weaving Factory in 2004, the embroidery of the waves of inhaling and exhaling breaths are a visual manifestation of the topography of body, life and death as a repetitive cycle.
6. Deductive Object, 2016, plaster casting of artist’s arms and antique wooden table, 152 x 74.5 x 76 cm
Two arms face each other in this very first sculpture of Kimsooja’s body cast by the artist herself. The thumb and the index finger in both hands come into a contact to signify a ‘void’, which is a concept the artist has addressed for many years suggesting a transcendental state as opposed to materiality and desires.
7.Thread Routes V, 2016, stills from 16mm film transferred to HD format, 21:48,
with sound
Thread Routes V is one of Kimsooja’s 16mm film series. The new chapter in this series takes place in the native cultures of America’s Navajo and Hopi lands against the backdrop of geological wonders, such as Shiprock and Canyon de Chelly in Arizona, and the architectural ruins of the Chaco Culture in New Mexico. These bold monumental forms contrast with the craft arts indigenous to Native American people, and this work as a whole sheds an anthropological light on the primitive gesture in the artist’s act of weaving, wrapping and unwrapping fabric. Referred to as 'visual poem' and 'visual anthropology', Thread Routes - V presents structures in nature, architecture, agriculture and gender relationships in different cultures.
8. Deductive Object, 2016Deductive Object, 2016, painted steel, 2.45 x 1.5 m (dia.), mirror panels, 10 x 10 m
Shown in the museum’s courtyard, Deductive Object is a large ovoid sculpture on a mirror plinth. This work is inspired by the Indian stone Brahmanda, also known as "cosmic egg", signifying the birth of totality. In this elliptical work, a stone Brahmanda form is wrapped in an Obangsaek band of five traditional colors of Korea. It geometrically formulates the Bottari, which the artist has used since her early works signifying the human birth, growth and death, and reflects it through the mirror, symbolizing the origin and cycle of universe.
9. To Breathe, 2016, site specific installation consisting of diffraction grating film, dimensions variable
In this ever-evolving continuation of the artist’s early paintings and drawings, light is diffracted into a radiant color spectrum in this work, intensifying the point of contact between the work and the audience. To Breathe illustrates how material becomes immaterial just as brush strokes are formulated into light, and defines the artist’s creative language which seeks to fill space by emptying it. ■
Biography
Kimsooja (1957- )
Lives and works in New York, Paris and Seoul
2016 MMCA Hyundai Motors Series 2016: KIMSOOJA Archive of Mind, MMCA, Seoul, Korea
2015 Kimsooja - To Breathe, Centre Pompidou Metz, Metz, France
Kimsooja: Thread Routes, Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa, Bilbao, Spain
2014 Kimsooja, A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir, 1st Cornell University Biennale Ithaca, New York, USA
2013 Kimsooja / Unfolding, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada
2013 Kimsooja, To Breathe: Bottari, The Korean Pavilion, 55thBiennale diVenezia, Venice, Italy
2012 Kimsooja: A Needle Woman, Miami Art Museum, Miami, USA
2010Kimsooja, Earth - Water - Fire - Air, NPPAP - Yong Gwang Nuclear Power Plant Art Project, Organized by The National Museum of Contemporary Art, South Korea
2009 A Needle Woman - Paris, Hôtel De Ville Paris, Commissioned by Nuit Blanche 2009, Paris, France
Kimsooja: A Needle Woman, Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK
2008 Black Box: Kimsooja, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., USA
2006 Kimsooja, To Breathe - A Mirror Woman, a site-specific installation at the Crystal Palace, commissioned by MuseoNacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain
2006 Kimsooja, To Breathe / Respirare, a Site-Specific Installation at La Fenice Theater, in conjunction with a joint Solo Exhibition at FondazioneBevilacqua la Masa, Venice, Italy
2004–2003 Kimsooja, Conditions of Humanity, traveling solo show, Museum KunstPalast, Düsseldorf, Germany; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France; Padiglioned'ArteContemporanea, PAC, Milan, Italy
2002 Participated in 71st Whitney Biennial, Central Park, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA
2001 Kimsooja, A Needle Woman, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, MOMA, New York, USA
2000 Participated in Sharing Exotism, The 5th Biennale de Lyon
2000, Halle Tony Garnier, Lyon, France
1999, 2001, 2005, 2007 Participated in The 48th, 49th, 51st, 52ndVenice Biennale, Venice, Italy
1998 participated in The 24th Sao Paulo Biennale, Sao Paulo, Brazil
1997 Bottari, Choreographed by Christopher House, Performed by Toronto Dance Theater, Conceptual Scenic design by Kim
Sooja, Harbourfront Premiere Dance Theater, Toronto, Canada
Participated in The 5th Istanbul Biennale, Istanbul, Turkey
1996 Participated in Manifesta 1, Museum Boymans Van-Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
1995, 2002, 2012 Participated in The 1st, 4th, 9th KwangJu Biennale, KwangJu, Korea
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea
313 Gwangmyeong-ro Gwacheon-si Gyeonggi-do 427-701 South Korea