I’ve always thought that the best thing in the world would be getting paid to just eat and sleep. Well, Miru Kim, a Korean-American performance artist found a way to do just that. Except, she calls it a form of art. Influenced by Buddhist teachings that all livings beings are connected in a circular manner through life force, Kim wanted to mingle with animals and feel her existence more than ever.
She therefore decided to eat and sleep with pigs, naked, for four straight days. Starting last Friday, she ended up spending 104 consecutive hours in a makeshift pen right in front of her gallery, in the company of pigs. Her project “I Like Pigs and Pigs and Pigs Like Me,” for Art Basel in Miami, is in fact a small scale version of what she had done earlier, when she curled up naked next to pigs in hog farms.
Photo by Martha Cooper
Kim herself has admitted that she is a neat-freak, a germaphobe, and staying in the muck of a hog farm was no easy job. After the shooting, it drove her crazy that she could not get the smell off her bare feet. This was no deterrent to the 30-year old artist, however, who says she was also inspired after reading Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, by Michel Serres, a French philosopher. The book talks about the characteristics of skin. Miru Kim feels that all living beings are alike, with skin serving as a “mingling point between the outer world and inner self, and between body and soul.”
Photo by Martha Cooper
What Kim feels is soul-seeking art, may be something many others define as erotica. What’s your take on this?
via Huffington Post
