Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
July 12, 2025
Seoul-born artist Bek Hyunjin led a walkthrough of his solo exhibition Seoul Syntax. Bek has lived and worked in Seoul for over 50 years. While the city has remained a constant in his life, it itself is always changing and evolving. Both systematic and variable, the city represents a juxtaposition of stability and insecurity in Bek’s life. “Syntax” refers to the structure and order of language, as well as the relationship between signs and their meanings. Across painting, installation, sound, and performance, Bek’s work captures Seoul’s chaotic and restless patterns, mapping its unique rhythms and structures.
Bek Hyunjin(b.1972) has been actively performing across diverse fields as a painter, installation artist, performance artist, musician, actor, director, and graphic designer. His painting, which he intuitively carries out immersed in the process without any plans or purpose, shows Bek’s construction ability as a versatile artist. As for Bek, the surface of canvases is the ground where gesture, motion, poetical and musical rhythm merge. Bek has held numerous exhibitions at major art institutions such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul, Korea), Plateau Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea), Art Sonje Center (Seoul, Korea), Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum (Shanghai, China), and Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, Austria). In 2017, he was chosen as the nominee/sponsored artist for the ‘Korea Artist Prize 2017’ of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. As a singer-songwriter, Bek works actively as a member of the Uhuhboo Project, the first-generation indie band, and a project band Bahngbek. A maverick actor who steadily practices his omnidirectional artistic activities, Bek appeared in movies The Day He Arrives, Gyeongju, and Keys to the Heart.