TORONTO — Nearly 30 years ago, Kimsooja staged her first North American solo exhibition, Soo-ja Kim: A Laundry Field/Sewing into Walking, Looking into Sewing. Mounted at the Oakville Galleries, a contemporary art museum in an affluent Lake Ontario town about 22 miles (~35.4 km) west of Toronto, the presentation featured the Centennial Gallery walls painted black and dozens of colorful, used Korean bedcovers hung 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.”
Now, after many international exhibitions, commissions, and biennial and triennial appearances, the artist has returned to Toronto with Kimsooja: Dimensions of a Needle at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA). The compact survey gathers works from the past 20 years and neatly reflects her deliberate explorations of video performance, architectural installation, and ceramics, alongside her unwavering interest in the needle as a symbol of folding and unfolding, memory and displacement.
Grounded in the artist’s increasingly immaterial philosophy of “non-doing” and “non-making,” the site-specific installations occupy MOCA’s first and third floors. The exhibition opens smartly on the main floor with “To Breathe—Mokum” (2025–26), a work that deliberately evokes the clothesline installation of “A Laundry Field.”
