[Contemporary Art @ Korea] Kim Beom_Solo Exhibition
Contemporary art @ Korea/Review 2010.06.27 09:37With trendy spectacle-like domestic and international exhibitions galore, Kim Beom’s exhibition is like a humble breakfast. It’s not easy for a modern man to have the time for a breakfast, but the experts always stress the importance of it to the human health. One can truly feel the power of a humble breakfast in maintaining health when it is consumed. Kim emits the powerful strength that nurtures our mental health through each meaningful works in his humble exhibition.
A graduate of
Animation Rhetoric
To refer to someone who cannot understand things easily, one uses the expression “to sing psalms to a dead cow.” Although a dead cow may not understand words, the cow in Kim’s works is somehow different. It ploughs the land like a human being, using a horse. The scene in which reappearing subjects like horse, cow, bird and other animals as well as other everyday objects are being educated like students, discloses the rules of animation that bestows life to a still object through movement. The single-channel video Inanimated Objects is an animation work which shows a purely materialistic perspective by capturing everyday objects like a clock or a bomb undergoing a transformation process like dying and decaying animals. Kim showed a variety of animation works, including the 2008 video Inanimated Objects and drawing animations 10 Animated Drawings, Horse Riding Horse and Flower. 10 Animated Drawings (2007) is a 3 min. 10 sec. single-channel drawing animation which is a continuation of 26 Untitled Drawings from early 1990s. An animated version of flat drawings in 26 Untitled Drawings, the 10 Animated Drawings deal with personal and universal notions of anxiety, frustration, relationship with objects, difficulties of existence, uncertainties, violence and sarcasm. The animated pencil drawings make the audience laugh, or at least smile. A cow ploughs a field, and a thought becomes a reality as one imagines someone aiming a gun at him and actually physically tries to avoid the bullet. A spoon transfigures into a winged bird, then into a cross. Like an irrational spectacle that unfolds between two beings of the same species, Horse Riding Horse is a drawing animation of a horse, rather than a person, riding a horse. Using animals that might appear in children’s animation such as Lion King or Fantasia, the animation signifies a world in which the prey chases the weak, alluding to the unjust social structure of human existence. Like his animations, the documentary video series of ‘educated objects’ such as A Rock That Learned the Poetry of JUNG Jiyong, A Rock That Was Taught It Was a Bird, A Ship That Was Taught There is No Sea and Objects Being Taught They are Nothing but Tools follows the animation format in the sense that objects are personified. Teachers educating stones, boats and other objects, is truly a comic spectacle. A Rock That Learned the Poetry of JUNG Jiyong is a 12-hour video that recorded the reading and explaining of JUNG Jiyong’s poem, which became a taboo due to him returning to
Power Game
Kim sharply points out the everyday things, beliefs and institutionalization in our lives through black humor in his works, such as in Objects Being Taught They are Nothing but Tools, as well as in works like Slave Key Ring, A Draft of a Safe House for a Tyrant and Spectacle, a video in which a cheetah chasing an antelope is edited and reversed to a cheetah being chased by an antelope. Kim’s works are composed of events that cannot take place in reality. In the distortion of abnormally twisted images, we can read countless structures of power, from obvious political powers and master-servant power struggles, to microscopic power struggles in relationships with people and the power struggle to ‘otherize’ each other. Kim’s work is an utterance about a delightful world that is stimulating yet inviting humor, suggesting the audience to see that ‘invisible things’ and ‘visible things’ are reversible, and to be considerate of difference in people.
Such works derive from Michel Foucault’s interpretations on the problems of knowledge and power. Approaching and analyzing the dangerous ‘abnormal’ individuals in terms of religious, medical and legal basis of the 19th Century, Michel Foucault criticized that authority confined and ‘abnormalized’ the insane as well as others, and stressed the importance of an individual’s existence. In his book Les Anormaux, Foucault criticized the royal authority in 16th Century, regarding the king as the ‘tiger of a primitive society,’ a prey that loiters the society. Furthermore, Foucault points out the fact that ‘surveillance technology’ was being developed in the 19th century when different administrations of power were being established, giving birth to terminology like as surveillance for children, the insane, the poor and the laborers. To summarize his message through analyzing the examples of the insane in history, or precisely the French history, we are to be reminded of the historical instances in which power and discipline alienated people from the society, and to realize the importance of a human being as it is. Through institutionalization in this society, we become infinitely standardized and uniformed. The private education fever in the heat of university entrance examination system in
It may be a bitter in the grown-up world of regulations where the strong prey upon the weak. However, like portrayed by Kim’s Spectacle, in which a cheetah is being preyed by an antelope, and where regulations, institutionalization and power is being counterattacked, one can see glimpses of hopeful possibilities and spurts of optimistic energy.
(This text was an on-site review written by a critic selected and supported by ‘Art Critic Support Program’ by Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, for artist selected by ‘2010 Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture Support Program.’)
IAN, Art Critic