Art21 Artist Kimsooja Gives a Lecture

October 22, 2009

Kimsooja, a featured artist in the award-winning PBS series, Art:21-Art in the Twenty-First Century, will give a lecture at 2:30 p.m., Wednesday, November 4, in the Palmer Lipcon Auditorium, Palmer Museum of Art, on the Penn State University Park campus. The Penn State School of Visual Arts’ John M. Anderson Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series sponsors Kimsooja’s lecture.

Kimsooja, who is featured in the Art21 season five episode, ‘Systems,” was born in 1957 in Taegu, South Korea. She received a B.F.A. in 1980 and a M.A. in 1984 from Hong-Ik University in Seoul. Her videos and installations blur the boundaries between aesthetics and transcendent experience through their use of repetitive actions, meditative practices, and serial forms. Central to her work is the bottari, a traditional Korean bed cover used to wrap and protect personal belongings, which Kimsooja transforms into a philosophical metaphor for structure and connection.

Now living and working in New York, Kimsooja has received several honors, including the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2002). She was an artist-in-residence at the World Trade Center (1998) and P.S. 1 Museum in New York (1992), and École National Supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris (1984). She has had national and international exhibitions at museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2009), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2008), and Museo Nacional Centro de Artre Reina Soffia, Madrid (2006). For more information about the artist, visit http://www.kimsooja.com/. For more information about the PBS series Art:21, visit http://www.pbs.org/art21/.

Contact: Contact: Ann Shostrom, ams26@psu.edu