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Kimsooja
As you enter the Vancouver Art Gallery rotunda and mount the marble staircase to the second floor, you encounter Kimsooja's installation, Lotus Zone of Zero. Adapted to fit within this specific space, it consists of a floating ceiling of Korean temple lanterns in the shape of lotus blossoms, and a soundtrack composed of chants from three different religious traditions, Buddhist, Christian and Islamic. These prayerful sounds, twining upward towards the rotunda's neo-classical dome, is extremely moving. Originally conceived by Kimsooja in response to the Iraq war, the installation's visual and aural components communicate an ongoing and idealistic longing to bring disparate religious and cultural groups together in a state of what she calls "harmonious coexistence."
Surprisingly, given Kimsooja's soaring international reputation, her hundreds of exhibitions and installations from Cologne and Chicago to Tokyo and Beijing, and her representation of Korea at the 2013 Venice Biennale, the VAG is the first institution to bring her work together in a comprehensive survey. The 30-year retrospective for the 56-year old artist, who is based in New York, Paris and Seoul, demonstrates not only the evolution of her art-making but also the coherence of her themes, materials and strategies. These are manifest from her early wall-mounted works, composed of hand-stitched fragments of found fabric; through her revelatory installations of bottari, the large fabric bundles which draw on the Korean tradition of using bed covers to wrap and transport clothing and other household items from place to place; to her visually and emotionally sumptuous deployment of photography, performance and video.
Born in the South Korean city of Daegu, Kimsooja had a geographically unsettled childhood: her father was in the military and the family moved frequently from place to place, sometimes finding themselves dangerously close to the DMZ (the Korean Demilitarized Zone). This formative experience replays in her art as a recurring feeling of dislocation, a sympathy with the experience of migration and the condition of exile. Even more...