Kim Soo-Ja

“Conditions of Humanity,” Korean artist Kim Soo-Ja’s first solo show in Italy, includes many of her best-known works, including the video installation A Needle Woman, 1999–2001—in which Kim stands immobile amid crowds of hurrying pedestrians in Tokyo, Shanghai, and New Delhi—and her sculptural bundles of blankets and used clothes. Also here is A Laundry Woman, 2000/2004, a large installation in the gallery’s modernist outdoor plaza. Here, Kim has attached traditional Korean fabrics to thin metal wires suspended between the walls of the building. Visitors are invited to walk among the vividly colored cloths, which are densely embroidered with symbolic motifs and hung like laundry put out to dry. The piece has such a strong and immediate impact that it is only upon extended viewing that it leads us to reflect and consider the overdetermined everyday uses of these fabrics—as bedcovers, nuptial sheets, improvised suitcases, or as veils for covering or uncovering the body. This characteristic work is a poetic meditation rooted in the cultural forms of Kim’s native land, which she imbues with utterly new meanings and implications.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.