Eyes and Horns
2021 · 6m · South Korea
Directed by Chaerin Im
Genres: animation, experimental, surrealism
Tones: dark, provocative, surreal
An experimental animation channeling Chaerin Im's anger at the art world's patriarchal history, reimagining Picasso's Vollard Suite as a Minotaur's violent struggle between male and female that dissolves the boundaries of sexes.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Im takes the Western canon's most sacred cow and doesn't just deconstruct it—she weaponizes it, dissolving Picasso's formal logic into pure formal chaos; it's the kind of "wait, WHAT?" that actually justifies itself through sheer conceptual audacity.
Eyes and Horns positions itself brilliantly within the lineage of feminist intervention in modernism, using the Vollard Suite as both source and battleground; the editing discipline Im brings to the metamorphosis—each boundary dissolution precisely timed—reveals craft thinking through formal rigor.
The decision to animate the dissolution itself rather than depicting it—letting the Minotaur's body become the site of visual negotiation between masculine and feminine forms—is the one choice that transmutes what could be didactic into something genuinely unsettling and singular.