Kim Beom: I Can't Hear You Screaming

Today, pirated copies of his video Yellow Scream (2012) are viral hits on YouTube, and he was the subject of a major retrospective in 2023, "How to become a rock," at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul. In this conversation on the occasion of his exhibition at Leeum, Kim reflects on the existential and ontological questions that have motivated him across his career. Since the 1990s, your work has revolved around ideas of perception and imagination. Unlike many conceptual works that are dense, demanding, and often intimidating to general museum audiences, you employ humor to draw in viewers and have them question things we often take for granted or overlook, such as how we perceive the world around us-including our social institutions that shape our behavior or the human existential condition. Since ancient times people have projected life or personhood onto objects or animals.