Class Blog

Midterm:
           

Kimsooja is a performance artist, in the video she speaks about a video she made called " A Needle Woman" she starts the video by showing an image of her laying on a large rock she is facing the nature her back towards the camera and the lens represents the human watching her, she makes her artwork from the viewers perspective. In the video Kimsoojaa speaks about her process while thinking of doing this specific video, she was thinking of doing a walking performance. While walking through Tokyo in 1999 she found herself in a large crowd of people and she decided to walking because she couldn't walk anymore, she used her body as a symbolic needle into the earth representing the energy that she had at the time. The people walking all around her are used as slow motion for the video and they represent a form of needles going thru her body. The entire video is done while her back to the camera never revealing the artist's identity I think this video was made this way because it shows how one can essentially stop living but that the world continues to move forward with or without you. The materials that the artist is using for her art are her body and the environment. There are three different perspectives in this art they are the camera lens, her eyes, and the people in front and around her. The artist is interested in representational art and the way this is showed in her work is by never showing her identity she represents live and it is up to the viewer to make their own conclusion about the art in front of them. In the video the artist states that her work is always in transition/ in process and that her work is never really finalized. There is also another video of her on top of a moving truck with representing her life as she explains that her father a military man was forced to constantly move with the family, she states that it is a part of their history. I feel that Kimsooja is successful in her work because instead of using material around her, her work is focused on making the person the work of art not a tangible materialistic object, this made me think differently about the way artist work because I never thought about someone as a work of art I just though of art as a painting or a sculpture now things that are in motion like people. Something that surpised me about this artist and her work is that the way she makes her art can be interpreted by many people ant they would see it differently, it is not like looking at a paining where for the most part you know what is happening.