Description

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’s poetic, poignant works on authoritarian regimes—South Korea, for example, during the 1970s and ’80s—where education was frequently used as a tool to influence people’s view about the world and themselves.

Beom 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. Kim often uses ready-made objects—in this work, a wooden table, a stone, and a tree bough—and turns them into a sculptural assemblage.