Spectacle, 2010, single-channel video, 1 minute, 7 seconds, loop. Courtesy of the artist.
For three decades Kim Beom’s practice has been concerned with perception and knowledge. In Spectacle (2010), he proposes an absurd reversal of the natural order to challenge truths and emphasize tensions between interior and physical worlds. A one-minute looped video, Spectacle inverts the riveting scene, common in nature programs, of a cheetah chasing an antelope in the savannah: an iconic image of predator and prey, hunter and hunted. Working with found television footage that he edited into a perpetual chase of the cheetah by the antelope, Kim reflects on accepted truths and categories, on pre-conceived filters and impermanence. He relies on the most profound simplicity to capture the tensions and absurd details of the everyday.
In Horse Riding Horse (After Eadweard Muybridge), 2008, Kim re-animates Eadweard Muybridge’s film The Horse in Motion (1878), which is considered one of the first works of moving image. Muybridge’s film provoked questions around authenticity, truth, and reality effects in what was then termed instantaneous photography. Kim’s parodic version depicts an anthropomorphised horse riding on the back of a horse. As he often does in his work, Kim deploys humor to provoke questions about "natural order." On the one hand, the work is concerned with the effects of small machines and systems–such as Muybridge’s instantaneous photographs–and their current implications in solidifying existing power structures and hierarchies. On the other hand, Beom’s video is meant to disorient the viewer and confuse given meanings and possibilities.
