Kimsooja Comes Full Circle
Her first exhibition in the city for 30 years captures her single-minded focus on the needle as a metaphor for folding and unfolding, memory and displacement.
TORONTO — Kimsooja held her first North American solo exhibition, Soo-ja Kim: A Laundry Field/Sewing into Walking, Looking into Sewing, nearly 30 years ago. Organized at the Oakville Galleries, a contemporary art museum in an affluent Lake Ontario town approximately 22 miles (~35.4 km) west of Toronto, the artist had the Centennial Gallery walls painted black and hung dozens of colorful, used Korean bedcovers from clotheslines.
“There is a swirling energy from the overhead fans as the bedcovers create alleyways for the viewer to walk through or between,” writes Oakville Galleries Curator of Contemporary Art Marnie Fleming in the exhibition catalog. “Wind generated movement becomes animation as Kim makes the bed covers’ intimate relationship with women’s lives, as well as their role in divisive labour, instructively visible.”
Today — many international exhibitions, commissions, and biennial and triennial representations later — she returns to Toronto with Kimsooja: Dimensions of a Needle at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA). The taut survey of works from the past 20 years succinctly captures her methodical experiments with video performance, architectural installation, and ceramics, not to mention her single-minded focus on the needle as a metaphor for folding and unfolding, memory and displacement. Rooted in the artist’s increasingly immaterial philosophy of “non-doing” and “non-making,” the site-specific installations take over MOCA’s first and third floors, savvily beginning on its main floor with “To Breathe—Mokum” (2025–26), a work that intentionally recalls the clothesline installation of “A Laundry Field.”
