Her principle of ‘non-doing’ and ‘non-making,’ which follows a conceptual and structural investigation of performance through modes of mobility and immobility, inverts the notion of the artist as the predominant actor.

She utilized fabric forming cruciform structures that synthesized an entangled and knotted vision of society and the world into a system of horizontals and verticals.

Growing up female in South Korea during the mid to late 1990s, Kimsooja created work that many Korean women could relate to through their collective attempts to remove themselves from the patriarchal social systems at play.

[19] Subsequent to a residency at MoMA PS1 in 1992–93, Kimsooja initiated a series of site-specific installations that found their origin in the Korean color spectrum (obangsaek).

[20] While any kind of fabric can be used to make bottari, Kimsooja favours second-hand clothes to allude to the passage of time and the objects’ previous life before they were transformed into works of art.

A year later, Kimsooja returned to the valley for the first Gwangju Biennale in Korea and scattered various clothes made of traditional Korean fabrics on the ground of a forest.

She moves on to different neighborhoods of Paris, which signifies the history of immigrants in France: Ivry (large Chinese community), Place d’Italy, Bastille, Place de la Republic, Canal Saint-Martin (which used to have tents along the canal area from homeless people, now much cleaned, making a water tunnel), Gare du Nord, Goutte d’Or (a large African, Middle Eastern, Indian community), to the destination ‘Église Saint-Bernard’, where most of the illegal immigrants settled down and protested their right to live in France in 1996; that has become a big political issue in French society.

[12] In A Needle Woman, the artist is seen with her back facing the camera, wearing precisely the same clothes and standing precisely the same way in various metropolises:[30][31] Tokyo, Shanghai, Delhi, New York, Mexico City, Cairo, Lagos, London, Patan, Nepal (1999–2001); and in a second series of performances: Havana, Cuba; N’Djamena, Chad; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Sana’a, Yemen; and Jerusalem (2005).

[12] Some locations visited in the work are places of violence, disrepair, or unresolved conflict, lending to the needle a metaphoric function as an instrument of healing.

[31] Also in A Laundry Woman (2000), a performance video piece shot in India, Kimsooja is seen immobile and standing in front of a river where debris seemingly drift.

[31] The first version of A Needle Woman presented the artist laying horizontally on a rock and it established nature and spatial orientation as a central subject in her work.

[12][32] Here, the concept of fusion enhanced the idea of earlier experiments in immobility, continually incarnated in the artist's persistent representation of permanence and impermanence, horizontal and vertical structures, the forward and backward movements of sewing.

A five-channel audio track entitled The Weaving Factory (2004) accompanied the piece, forming a couplet of inhalation and exhalation of the artist's own breathing that became increasingly less agile as the color spectrum continued its gestation.

[36] Over the last two decades, Kimsooja has developed works that uses lights and color–in parallel to Obangseak color spectrum, which represents 5 cardinal directionality in Korean philosophy–in response to many historical and modern buildings.

Six speakers aligned the circle simultaneously played Gregorian, Tibetan, and Islamic chants, which echoed throughout the room and united at the hollow center.

[12] For the piece entitled To Breathe: Bottari, Kimsooja wrapped the entirety of the national pavilion's interior with a translucent film that diffracted daylight, showering the internal structure with spectrums of light.

[39] Other notable public commissions include: A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir (2014), a monumental 46-foot-tall sculpture commissioned and installed for the Cornell Council for the Arts 2014 Biennial on the campus of Cornell University;[40] and Mandala: Zone of Zero, which premiered at The Project in New York City in 2003 and consisted of the sound of Tibetan, Gregorian, and Islamic chants animating a large target-shaped jukebox.