Kim Sang Lan is one of the most playful serious artists with whom I’ve worked. She plays while engaged in serious work. Or, even clearer, She is quite intense and serious in her creative and playful pursuits. Her life and her work have become an intricate and subtle tissage of balanced forms and commitments. Her existence is one of dancing threads from morning to night. Her language is thread : the outcome is fiber sculpture, bas-reliefs, textiles, environments. Much of her work is held together by knots and in her Korean tradition the “knot” has a priviledge place of great respect. People of all ages wear and tie knots. Links are made with knots just as ceremonial and ritual dressing are incomplete without the proper knotted display. Sang Lan has metamorphonized The ancient knot into a modem language of art by creating large environmental works held together
by knots.
It sounds rather simple but on deeper examination one realizes how many factors come into play : Space, form, color, texture, weight, light, time. The poetic manipulation of threads by hand-combined wiht energetic long hours of dedication are what make the textile artist a creature apart. While part of the greater world of art, painting and sculpture, fiber art is more dependent and interactive with architecture. It is possible to trace the development of Sang Lan’s work these past IO years as she increased the scale and size of her work from objects to be hung on walls to objects to be displayed in open air or extended landscapes.
By recording her experiences with photography She has enabled us to participate in excursions to exotic places where she exhibits her fiber work in new ways. In a sense She has leaped from the wall to the floor. to out doors and may be next exploring outer space on the back of a modest thread
Sheila Hicks
1992
