Yellow Scream (2024)

Screenshot of artist in front of yellow-painted canvas with caption “First let’s put some screams of unbearable confusion in the unpainted areas of the canvas”

At some point in grad school, I encountered what is now one of my favorite works of art in the whole world: Kim Beom’s Yellow Scream (2012). I’ll let the piece speak for itself—if you don’t watch the whole thing, at least jump to ~5:45 for a few seconds, and then skip around the rest of the recording:

Yellow Scream became one of my go-to frustration regulators: if I was feeling off, I’d watch the video and invariably feel better.1

Earlier this year2 I watched the video and then wanted to do some of my own screaming, so I made a little site for yell-painting a digital canvas:

Yellow Scream (2024)

Animated screenshot of digital painting on canvas

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Today feels like an apt day to share both the original performance piece and my interactive homage to it. Are you also feeling off? Why not give yelling a try! To quote Kim Beom,

Prepare some lemon yellow on your palette, and let’s put in some anguished screaming to it.

Screenshot of palette with caption “Prepare some lemon yellow on your palette” Screenshot of palette with caption “and let’s put in some anguished screaming to it”

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When you’ve gotten some of the yelling out of your system, read the excellent Art Review article Kim Beom: Do Not Think at All and Online Screening: Kim Beom’s Yellow Scream (2012).

Thanks to Kim Beom for the years-long joy this piece has brought me.

Footnotes

  1. A labmate friend shared this yellow-as-stress-relief journey with me; I remember one day in particular when I went over to his desk to instigate a Timmies run, and found that his intense concentration wasn’t focussed on programming, he was watching Yellow Scream….↩︎

  2. I happened to be attending the Recurse Center at the time, and the Thursday presentation where I shared it was one of the highlights of my batch. I just looked through my screenshots of the hype/enthusiasm/joy in that Zoom chat and am now [re-]filled with warm fuzzies.↩︎