A Rock That Was Taught It Was a Bird

The man in the video repeats “You are a bird!” to a rock, while a sculptural assemblage to the left features a rock posed like a bird on a bough. A Rock That Was Taught It Was a Bird is one of Kim Beom’s satirical artworks. It comments on authoritarian regimes—South Korea during the 1970s and 1980s—where education was frequently used as a tool to influence people’s view of the world and themselves.

Kim is a Seoul-based artist whose mixed-media works are internationally well known. His art explores the intersection of various artistic genres and media, including poetry, drawing, video, painting, and installation. In this work, Kim uses a touch of humor to turn unrelated objects into one minimalistic sculpture packed with strong social critiques.

A sculptural assemblage includes, on a table on our left, a tree bough with winding limbs sawed off so all that remains is the "Y" shape of the branches in which a coarse, gray rock settles. On our right, a screen a fourth the size of the tree bough is captured showing a grainy, black-and-white still of a video.

A Rock That Was Taught It Was a Bird

2010

Kim Beom

(Korean, b. 1963)

Korea

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