81. Queens

During a residency in Queens in a former public school, a Korean artist trained as a painter finds herself responding in unexpected ways to the space she has been given to work in and the overwhelming sense of cultural and social strangeness she feels in New York. One day she turns her head and notices the bottari, a traditional Korean cloth bundle, sitting in her studio. For the first time she sees that these colorful textiles and even the bundle itself could be the vehicle for art-making. Following this revelation, she tears a textile into hundreds of tiny scraps that she carefully wedges between the bricks on one wall. She then places several bottari bundles around the space, realizing, as she later explains, that each one “was surely a sculpture and a painting.”

(Kimsooja)