Bird Pit is a book made up of a drawing series of ‘Portraits of the Ugly’. It portrays the people who are dissatisfied with everything and express their complaints in their own way. Those individuals are like a repressed birds trapped in a cage. SW.Kim draws those figures as if seen from a bird’s view. - pimple
SW. Kim’s staple-bound and offset-printed Bird Pit comes across first as lovably random, then as wryly tongue-in-cheek. This color book depicts a population of caricatured curmudgeons, who seem constantly unhappy regardless of their activity, be it feasting on a steak, watching porn, or reading a book titled How to Survive. The pages weave between individual character portraits dotted across ample blank space, in which each of these moderately deformed figures seems insurmountably isolated from the other, and scenes of their dysfunctional civilian everyday, with tents catching on fire during camping trips and free hugs being given out (with no takers, apparently) alongside stickups and robberies. From technical malfunctions to pervasive alienation, it seems that Kim’s insistently cheerless creatures do indeed have little to be cheerful about. Kim’s cartoonish style and grubby tints suit her dissatisfied subjects very well, both giving color to their maladjustment and softening its appearance from outright despair into wry (and still slightly desperate) humor. It is an experience of unexpectedly savory aftertaste, to slowly meander through and mull over the world of these discolored and misshapen people, who seem out of place even with no one around.
2017, 60 pages, 29.5 x 21cm, offset printed, edition of 300
