ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2025

Known for his wide-ranging practice across music, film, performance, and visual art, Bek Hyunjin has established a singular artistic language that translates emotional sensibility into visual rhythm. Following his recent solo exhibitions Seoul Syntax at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Los Angeles, and Second Life at Atelier Hermès, Seoul, Bek presents two new paintings, Late Fall and Spring (2025). Composed of delicate brushstrokes and translucent tones, these works visualise the subtle tremors of seasonal transition and emotional fluctuation, transforming inner states of being into lyrical abstraction. Through this union of seasonal rhythm and emotional temporality, Bek captures the quiet pulse of existence.

SAMBYPEN, a leading pop artist bridging visual art and popular culture, examines the desires and anxieties of the digital age with sharp irony and wit. By appropriating the visual codes of mass media and social imagery, he turns the language of online consumption into a critique of contemporary identity. In Devil’s Slap (2025), a red demon striking a blue figure becomes a metaphor for the tension between play and aggression, while Smoker (2025) visualises the quiet unease that drifts through moments of solitude. SAMBYPEN’s vivid compositions—bold outlines, sleek surfaces, and layered humor—reveal the psychological fatigue of an image-saturated era.

CHUNG, Hyun has long explored the essence of humanity through raw materials such as bronze, coal tar, timber, and steel. His sculptural language conveys time and memory through matter itself. Following his recent solo exhibition The Cumulative Busts at PKM Gallery, which marks a pivotal chapter in his thirty-year artistic journey, the artist presents a selection of 1990s coal-tar drawings and small bronze heads that reflect the formative period of his practice. In these works, the viscosity of tar traces the emergence and collapse of form, while bronze crystallises the human condition into mass and silence—affirming CHUNG’s enduring meditation on material, memory, and being.

Cody Choi investigates cultural friction and the phenomena born in its interstices through painting, sculpture, installation, and neon. The presentation includes his reinterpretations of classical Western sculptures—The Nike, The David, The Venus—reimagined with quotidian materials; a new painting created by layering oil pigment over AI-generated imagery on wood; his early work Golden Boy Poster (1986–1990), which juxtaposes his self-portrait with Asian iconography and Western consumer culture; and the neon work Down Side is Heavy (2010–2023). Together, these works crystallise Choi’s enduring engagement with cultural hybridity and the ironic humor of identity. Through language rendered in light and imagery formed from contradiction, his art exposes the tensions and absurdities that emerge where technology, history, and selfhood converge.