BEK HYUNJIN

Bek has spent his life navigating the gallery, the stage, and the screen, with Seoul serving as his home base. Embracing his own evolution alongside the city’s metamorphosis, Bek began several years ago to leave traces of his experiences and feelings. The works in Seoul Syntax are the visual results of this process. Notably, this exhibition shares a thematic pulse with his 2025 album, Seoul Syntax. While the album recorded Seoul as ‘the audible’ through his technique, senses, and heart, the works in this exhibition document the city as ‘the visible.’

The paintings and drawings in Seoul Syntax exemplify Bek’s refined formal language—one that achieves fullness through a process of emptying. With titles such as Winter, Spring, and Early Summer, his paintings evoke seasonal landscapes that mirror the artist’s spontaneous gestures as he navigates moments of Conundrum, Wavering, and stillness before finding a new Departure. His PW drawing series may initially appear as enigmatic codes (password; PW) titled using a minimalist system of production years and sequence numbers. They reveal a profound economy of means, where lines and color planes are rendered with a raw immediacy, stripped of pretense. Through his own unique syntax, Bek filters the complexities of contemporary Seoul—a place where stability and precariousness, intimacy and alienation, and triumph and failure coexist in a delicate balance.

Screening alongside these works is Light 23, a multidisciplinary piece that functions as a video work, music video, and short film. The project features actress Han Yeri from Minari (2020) and cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo from Parasite (2019). Filmed in a single take on the outskirts of Seoul at sunset, the video romantically captures the shifting weather and the full spectrum of human emotions. Mirroring the lyrics of the song Light23—which describe the sun, the other, and the three rays of light that dwell within the self— the work expands the static imagery of his paintings into a temporal, cinematic narrative. By unfolding Bek’s multifaceted vision of Seoul like a panorama, the exhibition offers an immersive engagement with the artist’s deep-seated connection to the city.

Bek Hyunjin has held numerous solo exhibitions in various places, including Korea, the USA, the UK, Germany, Italy, and Taiwan. Bek has participated in group exhibitions at major art institutions worldwide, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, Ilmin Museum of Art in Seoul, Art Sonje Center in Seoul, Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai, Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, and Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium in Vestfossen. In 2017, Bek was chosen as a sponsored artist for the ‘Korea Art Prize’ of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. He is also active as a singer-songwriter—both as a member of the pioneering indie band Uhuhboo Project, the project band Bahngbek, and Bek Hyunjin C—and as an actor, with appearances in films The Day He Arrives, Gyeongju, and Broker, as well as the series Moving and Taxi Driver. Bek continues to expand his wide-ranging artistic practice.