Kim Beom

Kim Beom's work is both comical and tender, marked by deadpan humor and absurdist ideas that playfully subvert everyday expectations. Through a diverse practice that includes drawing, sculpture, video, installations, and artist books, he explores a world where perception is fundamentally challenged.

Biography of Kim Beom

Kim Beom, born in 1963 in Seoul, is a multi-disciplinary artist currently living and working in Seoul. He studied at Seoul National University during South Korea's student democratization movement, earning a BFA in 1986 and an MFA in 1988. Then, he relocated to New York City, where he completed a second MFA at the School of Visual Arts in 1991. He stayed in New York until returning to South Korea in 1997.

Kim's notable exhibitions have been held at various galleries and museums, including Tina Kim Gallery, Nam June Paik Art Center, PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art, and Hayward Gallery. He has also participated in significant international biennales such as the Sharjah Biennial (2015), California Pacific Triennial (2013), Gwangju Biennale (2012), Media City Seoul (2010), 51st Venice Biennale (2005), 8th Istanbul Biennale (2003), and the Taipei Biennial (1998).

Kim Beom's works are part of prestigious collections at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Museum für Kommunikation in Bern, the Seoul Museum of Art, Ho-Am Art Museum in Seoul, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Gwachun, Korea.

Kim Beom's Art Style

Beom's drawings, sculptures, installations, videos, and artist books frequently employ absurd scenarios and deadpan humor to explore themes such as pedagogy, education, animism, and the life of objects. Additionally, his work draws on the traditions of his native Korean culture to both meditate on and critique the complex, often contradictory relationship between contemporary Korean society and the West.

His early works were inspired by cartoons, children's drawings, outsider art, and traditional crafts such as wood carving, paper cutting, and ceramics. Many of his drawings and paintings from the early 1990s depict aggressive imagery—such as hammers, axes, knives, nails, sharp glass shards, barbed-wire fences, and weapons—and frequently show physical 'violence' inflicted on the materials themselves through actions like cutting, tearing, folding, and sewing the canvas.

At STPI, he created a series of lithographs, cyanotype and Vandyke prints featuring architectural drawings and found video footage, collaged tiles with stenciled figurative imagery, and paper pulp sculptures. While these works appear straightforward, they subtly explore the instability of representation and humorously question the boundaries between reality and fiction. These pieces were showcased in his solo exhibition at STPI, titled Kim Beom: Random Life (2017).