Kimsooja, Topography of Body

Axel Vervoordt Gallery Hong Kong is pleased to present a solo exhibition by multidisciplinary conceptual artist Kimsooja. Topography of Body is Kimsooja’s first solo exhibition after several presentations in the city. The exhibition features a selection of work that demonstrates her vast multidisciplinary practice including the video performance, Thread Routes: Chapter III, a series of indigo Indian block prints, new clay and rice paper works, and two prints of Geometry of Body.

A hypnotic, heartbeat-like sound welcomes visitors and activates the space with a faint echo and its repetitive, mesmerising rhythm. Kimsooja invites the audience into a private universe in which she peacefully initiates quiet action, embracing and connecting those around her, engaging past and present, nature and architecture, and especially the inhabitants.

At the exhibition’s entrance, visitors find imprints from Kimsooja’s fingers and the residue of her hand-holding moments in clay, which, despite their repetitive conceptual basis, are inherently and fundamentally different. At the same time, the clay is an imprint of something absent — an emptiness transformed into materiality. The sculptures reference Kimsooja's acclaimed installation Archive of Mind (2016-), where visitors are invited to make clay spheres and leave them on a table. The action recalls those required for making a bottari, a bundle to protect and conceal belongings for transport or migration in many Asian cultures. Clay tells the participant's own story, with a sphere shape into which the world, the contemplations, have descended.

The first room shows two abstracted fingerprints, once symbols of identity, now referencing the lines of a topographic map. Titled Geometry of Body, the prints were made between 2013-2016 and developed from another project at a checkpoint at the Mexico-United States border crossing Mariposa Land Port of Entry. By having her fingerprints scanned, she wanted to bring cultural understanding and positive interaction between the two countries, by sharing the emotions, memories, and aspirations we all have in our lives.

Opposite to the fingerprints is the new work, Deductive Object: (Un)fold (2023), consisting of crumpled rice paper into a sphere, that was then gently smoothed again by hands, showing similar topographical lines, which can be traced back to the action of the hands. It’s an example of what is an invitation to participatory action, a shared moment of contemplation (as organised until September at the Centre Pompidou Metz, France). The compositions are not intentional, but determined by the coincidences of the folds, or created without the action to do so.

Kimsooja documents what she sees and experiences. For her, performance is an interference through not doing, not intervening, without making something, and showing ‘as it is’. Her work can be considered already made, with the emphasis on the prefix al: what she shows has a history, a singularity that she makes us aware of. Carrying an internal, inner history is also the basis of Kimsooja’s interest in textiles: “Cloth is thought to be more than a material, being identified with the body – that is, as a container for the spirit.”

When she recalls her experience of inserting a needle through fabric, Kimsooja talks about feeling the energy of the entire universe suffusing her entire body. It’s a notion that is central to her oeuvre — often conceptual rather than formal — in her work referring to forced movement and migration, bundling belongings, wrapping, and unfolding.

The Thread Routes series (2010-2019), a chapter of which is included in this exhibition, is directly linked to her earlier and later work, extending the notion to further dialectics, as Kim Sung Won described: “self and others, man and woman, wrapping and unfolding, spirit and material, civilisation and non-civilisation, traditional and contemporary, city and nature”.

As a visual poem or anthropology, the work explores the cyclical process from yarn to intricate carpet, as the ethereal, meditative repetition from abstraction to figuration. With it, she shows the global importance of daily labour activities, referring to nature, life, existence, and coexistence, but also how weaving and knitting refer to geometric, architectural, and agricultural forms, “that reveal their primeval truth and aesthetics”. She tried to expose how the aesthetics of movement, a strenuous choreography, unfolds in the actions of the bodies. “In a sense, I unwrap their bodies and minds, creating drawings of their movement and life.” Again, Kimsooja explores the metaphorical status of needle and thread — with another thread connecting the various scenes without narrative.

Kimsooja developed the idea for her first film series in 2002 in the Belgian city of Bruges when she attended a bobbin lace-making demonstration. The entire series shows different cultural zones around the world, with ‘performers’ sharing labour according to similarities and singularities. The first chapter in 2010, explored Peruvian weaving culture, and was described by Rosa Martinez as “reiteration as a rhetorical figure, insisting on the slowness of the gaze and committing herself to lengthy descriptions that highlight the poetry of Peruvian thread works and the pictorial juxtaposition of the elements she interconnects.”

The third chapter of the series (2012) was filmed in India, a return to the country where she performed and filmed for A Needle Woman (1999-2001), A Homeless Woman(2000), A Laundry Woman - Yamuna River (2000), and for the colourful visual and almost ethnographic tour that is Mumbai: A Laundry Field (2007). Thread Routes: Chapter III features traditional dyeing, knitting, embroidery, block printing, wood engraving, and tattooing; the archaeological sites and the temporary dwellings belonging to nomadic communities in the state of Gujarat; as well as two landmarks in Indian architecture: the Queen’s Stepwell (Rani ki vav) and the Sun Temple, Modhera, near the city of Ahmedabad. The archaeological constructions from the 11^th century (Chaulukya dynasty), seem to echo the patterns of fabrics through their ornaments and repeating stepwells, as if labour resonates.

Thread Routes’ first three chapters were shown together in various locations, such as at Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain, in 2015, and in 2019 in Poitiers, France, during the city-wide route Traversées, curated by Kimsooja in collaboration with Emma Lavigne and Emmanuelle de Montgazon. For this project, Kimsooja addressed the theme of ‘traversées’, or crossing, in relation to fifteen historical sites, with twenty artists participating.

At this exhibition, Geometry of Body, in dialogue with the video, is an engaging installation of under layers of Indian block printing table covers that the artist collected (2012-2015). These textiles, with stamped patterns of indigo ink, bear the marks of cyclical, repetitive labour. Coincidentally, Buddhism connects indigo to the symbolic meaning of intuition and inspiration.

The intricate layers of ink tie to the artist’s early experiments and search for an original painting methodology, since beginning college, after which she discovered sewing – and “using the fabric of life as a canvas and the needle as a brush”. As before in her work, a work of art did not come into being as such: a painting was not meant to become one. In the spirit of John Cage, a result is obtained without the ‘need’ to paint. Kimsooja breaks through the material, two-dimensional aspect of painting — she lets the old fabrics tell their stories and memories.