The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

99 ARTISTS Schematic Draft of a Disconnected Under River Tunnel 2016 Cyanotype on Saunders 638gsm paper / 81 x 56cm, ed. 2/8 (4 AP) / Purchased 2017. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Born 1963, Seoul, South Korea Lives and works in Seoul Kim Beom is part of the generation of South Korean artists whose adult life has coincided with their country’s transition to civilian democracy. He has developed a practice in which humility of scale and tone belies the sharp observations and absurdist humour of its content. For an artist whose work is so heavily influenced by conceptualism, Kim is surprisingly proficient in an array of techniques, from drawing to ceramics, venturing into installation, performance and publishing, including prose writing. His philosophical propositions, flights of fancy and wry social commentaries manifest in the most engaging ways. As with the best satire, of course, their abundant humour is always underpinned by seriousness and a sense of social frustration. Begun in 2004, Kim Beom’s ‘Blueprints and Perspectives’ series covers a wide range of imaginary machines, vessels and structures. These works typically consist of a lavishly rendered architect’s impression accompanied by a blueprint. 1 The colour pencil drawing of Spy Ship (Perspective) 2004 depicts a huge airborne vessel disguised as a cloud, distinguished only by its sleek shape and a small propeller at the rear. The accompanying blueprint reveals it to be held aloft entirely by thousands of helium balloons, its propeller turned by human hands. Apart from its downward-facing telescopes, the ship also houses a simple table and chairs arrangement for ‘wireless telephones’, a set of hammocks, and a rather insufficient-looking supply of hydrogen tanks. Meanwhile, A Design of a Building for Putting Together Hallucinated Heinous Criminals and Offensive Beasts 2002 takes the form of an enormous thought bubble. Inside, it combines the functions of an intensive security prison and a zoo. Other works in this droll series include a suitably evil-looking A Draft of a Safe House for a Tyrant 2009, complete with escape pod, and A Draft of a School of Inversion 2009, at which students receive instruction in anti-gravity over a three-year program. More recent works include Schematic Draft of a Disconnected Under River Tunnel 2016, whose two courses suddenly U-turn before meeting, leaving motorists back on the side of the river they started from; Residential Watchtower Complex for Security Guards 2016, whose outlooks double as tidy apartments, complete with garden plots; and A Floor Plan for Public Toilet 2016, an enormous, labyrinthine sanitation facility. As gleeful as these plans appear, with a grasp of engineering inventiveness appropriate to children’s fiction, they retain a sinister, parodic edge. Kim has described them as metaphors for society, based on the absurdity, inhumanity, arbitrariness and contradiction that he has experienced in his own life. The matter-of-factness of the blueprint reflects the technocratic depersonalisation and machine-like logic of contemporary economics and social design. This is in keeping with Kim’s practice in general, which tends to return to confusions between human subjects and inanimate objects as a central theme — installations such as Objects Being Taught They Are Nothing But Tools 2010 comprises a classroom for pedestal fans, kettles and bug spray; and his book The Art of Transforming (1997) provides instructions on how a person might become a ladder, a tree or an air conditioner. Kim’s comments on ‘Blueprints and Perspectives’ describe a system in which common people become social actors — bureaucrats, soldiers, police — ‘who do not show any emotion regarding their situation, or who clearly assume their roles’, 2 and a society under the control of ‘a huge, stupid force’. 3 With this political and institutional backdrop, Kim Beom points out that while none of the creations detailed in his ‘Blueprints and Perspectives’ series are real, ‘they are not that much more absurd and irrational than many things that we find in the real world’. 4 Reuben Keehan Endnotes 1 Blueprints were the staple method of reproducing technical drawings until the mid twentieth century, when they were replaced with more stable diazo prints, which were in turn superseded by photocopying and digital printing. Likewise, Kim has shifted from using cheap, light-sensitive commercial blueprints to a more archivally sound cyanotype process. 2 Quoted in James Clifton, ‘“You must be so confused”: The pseudolife of objects in the work of Kim Beom’, in Kim Beom: Permeable Boundaries , Miko McGinty, New York, 2015, p.27. 3 Quoted in Sunjung Kim, ‘Interview with the artist’, in Kim Beom: Animalia [exhibition brochure], REDCAT, Los Angeles, 2011, unpaginated. 4 Molly Taylor, ‘5 questions with Kim Beom’, Elephant , 25 May 2017, <https://elephant.art/5-questions-kim-beom> , viewed April 2018. KIM BEOM