Korean conceptual artist Kim Beom claims that “what you see is what you see” and “what you see is not what you see”—which, for viewers, is a good reason to approach his works with strong doses of imagination and complicity. The artist’s curious forays into materialism and existentialism are present in his assemblages of found objects. For example, An Iron in the Form of a Radio, a Kettle in the Form of an Iron, and a Radio in the Form of a Kettle (2002), redefined essence through visual assumption. Kim’s 2010 installation Objects Being Taught They Are Nothing But Tools offered a surreal apologue on the nature of being. If existence precedes essence, as the artist’s works suggest, there isno predetermined nature to be found in, say, an iron. When Kim erases visual context from innocuous items such as a bottle or a pepper grinder by shrouding them in paper pulp, he further implies that they exist only insofar as we imagine them.