PALMA DE MALLORCA.- Kewenig announces Kimsooja's solo show in Palma, on the night of 'Palma Photo. '
The Korean artist Kimsooja (born 1957 in Taegu, South Korea) lives and works on 3 continents, in cities New York, Seoul and Paris. As part of a renowned globally active art scene, her life is strongly determined by the process of mobility and migration. Living in New York she describes herself as a Korean in exile, her nomadic lifestyle a continuous and dominant expression within her body of art.
Her personal subjective perceptions and encounters are transformed in her conceptually inclined artworks, towards universal topics of humanity and its ever more tilt towards globalisation and the resulting weave of cultures. With an unmistakeable aesthetic clarity the multi media artist combines performance, video, photography, sculpture and installation, with the aid of light, sound and the use of materials, each with its own connotation of cultural heritage.
'To Breathe: Mandala' (2010) is an installation that is represented by a ready-made American jukebox speaker which has the structure of a Mandala. The speaker has an array of vivid colors with a rotating central section covered in mirrors. Playing on the speaker is a breathing sound performance of the artist’s amplified inhaling, exhaling and humming (The Weaving Factory, 2004). Enveloped within a rectangular space with curved edges and painted entirely in yellow, the spinning central mirror of the jukebox reflects light throughout the 13th century chapel in which it is installed. In Obangsaek—the Korean color field that represents the nature of the universe—yellow is situated at the center of the four cardinal points and signifies ‘universe’, ‘earth’, ‘power’ and ‘dignity’. Together with the artist’s breathing sounds, which recall both the individual and universal body, the speaker becomes a unifying axis, a mandala. Kimsooja leads us to a hypnotic and meditative outer space of timelessness, enhancing the sense of belonging to a universal, spiritual world, which inspires us to look within and reflect on our being in the world.
The bottari, a recurring sculpture, ready used object and concept, symbolic for the departure from a place and the migratory journey. is a bundle of a persons belongings such as bed sheets and clothes wrapped in a bundle of cloth. A piece of past realities and present aspirations. Originally to explore 'pigment' and the aesthetic of colour Kimsooja discovered the Bottari during a residency at PS1/MOMA in New York 1992. Enhancing the idea of interwoven cultures Kimsooja has prepared the bottari's in the exhibiton with local Mallorquin used objects.
The bottaris are accompanied by photographs of prior installations of bottaris, that are mounted in light boxes as to enhance the glow of their strong form and colour.
Also the work 'Encounter - Looking into sewing' from 1998-2011 shows colourful Korean bedclothes draped over an apparently faceless figure. Its privacy, intimacy, sex and dreams admonished and a mirror of ones self, unique and treasured under numerous layers of formalistic and social conventions.
Kimsoojas international exhibition activity boasts a number of renowned museums , such as Solo shows at: PS1/ MoMA, New York (2001), the Reina Sofia, Madrid (2006), the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul (2010), the Musée d'Art moderne St. Etienne (1012) and the Miami Art Museum (2012). In honour of her 30 years of artistic creation the Vancouver Art Gallery opened a large retrospective show in late 2013. The same year in which Kimsooja was the representing artst for Korea at the 55th Venice Biennial.
After 2 Solo shows in the recently closed Cologne Gallery in 2005 and 2007 KEWENIG is showing her work for the first time in Palma de Mallorca.
