Kim Beom
At the Contemporary Art Gallery until January 17

The first work you see when you walk into Kim Beom’s solo show at the Contemporary Art Gallery is a video titled A Rock That Was Taught It Was a Bird. In it, a man earnestly demonstrates avian activities, such as flying and perching on a tree branch, to a large, rough chunk of granite. It’s not a particularly distinguished rock: it isn’t shaped like a bird, nor, of course, is it in the slightest way responsive to its teacher. Still, the man continues to instruct it and to read aloud to it from a book about birds’ nests. He describes what the nests look like and how they are constructed, and every so often poses the hopeful question “Isn’t that interesting?”

The work is a nifty introduction to this South Korean artist’s practice, which uses elements of humour, absurdity, and surreal inversion to query the nature of perception and to subvert our fixed ideas about the world around us. He suggests that meaning is mutable, slippery, difficult to grasp. In his art, objects and creatures shift shape and character: an iron becomes a kettle, a kettle becomes a radio, a giraffe becomes a cheetah. Perspectives change, definitions elude us.

One of the themes in Kim’s exhibition, which includes drawings, video animation, sculptures, paintings, and mixed-media installations, is how our relationship with the natural world is characterized by certain representational conventions. Many of his untitled drawings and much of his animation, whose style is influenced by cartoons, children’s art, and outsider art, flip standard nature-program fare, so that herbivores become meat-eating predators and predators become prey. Images of ferocious dogs also recur here: one sharp-fanged canine leaps and snarls at the end of a chain, another tears itself to pieces. It’s as if Kim were challenging our confidence in the process of domestication: wild animals, he suggests, can never be truly tamed. (Given the recent spate of ghastly maulings of people by dogs, perhaps he is right.)

Kim also asks us to think about the ways formal education serves the state, moulding our understanding of who we are and what our role is in society. This is most obvious in his installation Objects Being Taught They Are Nothing But Tools, which takes the form of a miniature classroom. Here, everyday items such as a table fan, watering can, measuring cup, and bottle of dish detergent sit on little wooden chairs facing a blackboard and a video monitor. On the monitor, a teacher, the upper part of his face cut off from view so that we focus on his moving mouth, tells his “students” what their place is within the capitalist system, making it clear that they are not human, nor should they aspire to be. Absurd and amusing as is the image of household objects sitting in a classroom, the message is ultimately a serious one. Kim reminds us that education is not simply about conveying knowledge but about socialization, conformity, and the shaping of a world-view. We are all tools of the systems in which we are raised.

Some critics have observed that Kim is preoccupied with the life of objects. More to the point, he is preoccupied with the lives of his fellow human beings, and employs inanimate objects as human surrogates. And he uses absurdity not merely to undermine meaning in an entertaining way, but also as a form of resistance. While particular references to political conditions in Kim’s homeland may elude a western audience, his interest in democracy and human rights makes his work relevant to us all.