Opening:
Thursday, April 21 | 6-8pm631 West 2nd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012
www.redcat.org

REDCAT is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Los Angeles by Seoul-based artist Kim Beom.

Through an expansive practice that spans drawing, sculpture, video, and artist books, Kim contemplates a world in which perception is radically questioned. His visual language is characterized by deadpan humor and absurdist propositions that playfully and subversively invert expectations. By suggesting that what you see may not be what you see, Kim reveals the tension between internal psychology and external reality, and relates observation and knowledge as states of mind.

Organized around the theme and title Animalia, Kim’s exhibition explores the vast sphere of nature and the animal kingdom, often inverting its laws and collapsing the boundaries of living beings and inanimate objects. Refusing to accept the clear distinctions that separate realms of existence, Kim deftly employs animism, illusion and a deep sense of empathy in his works to reflect upon and transgress the social institutions that delineate natural order.

For the exhibition at REDCAT, Kim presents a recent series of sculptural tableaux titled “The Educated Objects” (2010)—four discrete installations of objects and video—which explore social education and developmental psychology. The works—A Rock That Was Taught It Was a Bird, A Ship That Was Taught There Is No Sea, A Rock That Learned the Poetry of JUNG Jiyong and Objects Being Taught They Are Nothing But Tools—employ the techniques of pedagogy to alter and invert socialization processes that give way to knowledge and learning. In addition, a selection of drawings from the artist’s “Perspectives and Blueprints” series will be on view. Made since the early 2000s, these drawings imagine, with great detail, structures and instruments of control for criminals, tyrants and spies, while operating as parodies on social and political order. The suite of drawings will be shown with two recent videos Horse Riding Horse (After Eadweard Muybridge) and Spectacle.

In conjunction with the exhibition, REDCAT will publish a catalogue on the artist’s extensive body of drawings from the mid-1990s to the present. The book will include color and black-and-white illustrations of the artist’s works and textual contributions by Clara Kim, Paola Morsiani and Park Chan-Kyong.

"Seniman embodies the various aims of Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (GSRB), or New Art Movement, which Priyanto Sunarto was exposed to while studying at Institut Teknologi Bandung.

The movement called for a wider perspective on what constituted Indonesian art, noting that it should draw directly from ordinary people, and include traditional crafts and daily aesthetics.

Here, both medium and text explore and comment on the tensions between art, the role of artists, and society's expectations of both."

They ironically subvert the ideas of teaching and learning. In addition, a selection of drawings from the artist’s “Perspectives and Blueprints” series will be on view. Made since the early 2000s, these drawings parody tools of social and political order such as incarceration and surveillance. The suite of drawings will be shown with two recent videos Horse Riding Horse (After Eadweard Muybridge) and Spectacle.