Kimsooja: Unfolding: Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada

KIMSOOJA Unfolding is the first retrospective exhibition to assess the thirty- year career of the Korean-born, Paris- and New York -based artist, and offers an unprecedented opportunity to trace the development of the artist’s practice from her earlier works to her more recent production.

While the scale and media of her art has varied widely, what remains constant is an engagement with questions of identity in the face of change and social flux. The exhibition highlights works that address notions of time, memory and displacement, and the relationship between the human body and the material world. This broad survey includes early textile-based pieces from the 1980s, Deductive Objects, large site-specific installations such as Bottari Truck, as well as single and multi-channel videos.

North American audiences were introduced to Kimsooja’s work in the early 1990s when she began constructing bottari—objects wrapped in colourful Korean fabrics—during a residency at MoMA PS1 in New York. Kimsooja’s adaptation of this Korean tradition of using fabric to bundle and transport domestic items not only garnered the international art community’s attention, but also became a formal and symbolic device that she continued to use throughout her career.

The exhibition is accompanied by the KIMSOOJA Unfolding book, co-published by the Vancouver Art Gallery and Hatje Cantz (Berlin), which features over 100 images of the artist’s work as well as essays by Daina Augaitis, Mary Jane Jacob, David Morgan, Selene Wendt and Suh Young-Hee.

Courtesy of Kimsooja Studio

Photo by Rachel Topham