Press release

Soo-Ja Kim
“Sewing into Walking”
8 June – 7 September 1997


This Korean woman artist, whose works have been seen in Europe only few times like on the occasion of the 1995 Venice Biennial and at the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam in 1996, has realized for her exhibition in MAGASIN’s Project Room, the installation Sewing into Walking.

With the use of second-hand clothes Soo-Ja Kim creates large site-specific installations. Clothes wrapped in bundles, stretched or hung occupy the space and are charged with autobiographical references while addressing feminist, social and political issues. Her installations can be considered big canvases, as she herself often refers to a relation between painting and sewing. Through clothes that carry their emotional and historical implications and by applying the mainly feminine millenarium process of sewing, the artist challenges our perception of established political and cultural boundaries offering us a “second skin“ under which we can discover and redefine history.

Soo-Ja Kim was born in 1957 in Taegu. She works and lives in Korea. In 1984, she obtained a degree in painting at the Honk-Ik University. In 1985, she studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Paris. She was in residency at P.S.1 Museum, New York in 1992-93.