In the summer of 2025, Korean multidisciplinary artist Bek Hyunjin held his first solo exhibition in the United States at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles.

More than a milestone in international exposure,《Seoul Syntax》marked a pivotal moment in the artist’s trajectory—one in which he confronted an unfamiliar cultural and artistic ecosystem with his own language, structure, and urban sensibility.

Writing, Speaking, and Reconfiguring the City

《Seoul Syntax》articulates Bek Hyunjin’s unique method of composing the "grammar of Seoul." He does not aim to nostalgically portray or realistically reconstruct the city. Instead, he visualizes its unseen language—its rhythms, temperatures, structures, and sensory logic.

The exhibition features a series of paintings created with oil, ink, and spray enamel, alongside sculptural installations made with found objects such as sauna chairs and nickel silver trays (2024).

By rearranging familiar materials, Bek constructs witty yet disorienting compositions that provoke new interpretations of Seoul’s sensibility—now refracted through the context of Los Angeles.

Who Is Bek Hyunjin?

Bek Hyunjin is a multidisciplinary creator who traverses the boundaries between music, visual art, performance, and installation.

After withdrawing from the Department of Sculpture at Hongik University, he first gained public recognition in the late 1990s as the lead of the experimental music group Uhuhboo Project. Since then, he has constructed an idiosyncratic artistic language that resists classification into any single genre.

His work is defined by dissonance and sudden emotional shifts in music, rhythmic variations and repetition in visual forms, and a strong performative element through spoken word and bodily expression.

Bek is an artist who consistently “Speaks in his own way.” Rather than conforming to institutional aesthetics, he insists on pushing forward his own emotional and sensory codes, establishing a deeply individual artistic practice.


 
Meeting Tanya Bonakdar

《Seoul Syntax》is Bek’s first solo exhibition in the U.S. and also the first solo show by a Korean artist hosted by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in its history.

Founded in 1994 in SoHo, New York, the gallery relocated to Chelsea and became a major player in the contemporary art scene. Its Los Angeles branch, opened in 2018, has focused on showcasing artists who challenge genre boundaries—through sound, installation, and photography.
 
Bek’s exhibition marks the first time that a Korean sensibility has been structurally rendered into a visual language within the West Coast art world.
In this context,《Seoul Syntax》becomes not just an exhibition, but an experiment: a test of how Korean contemporary artistic language might function within a Western institutional space.

 
In the exhibition press release, the artist wrote:

“《Seoul Syntax》is an attempt to rewrite the sensibilities, thoughts, and rhythms of the city I grew up in—within the context of an entirely different place, Los Angeles. Syntax is the order of language, but also the space where meaning slips and misaligns.”
 

This statement encapsulates Bek’s practice: the exploration of cracks—between structure and rupture, between meaning and void, between language and city. His art lives in, and works through, these in-between spaces.
 


A New Sentence in Korean Contemporary Art

《Seoul Syntax》is less a definitive statement than an unfolding sentence—one that records the structural collision that occurs when urban sensibilities move beyond the city itself.
 
It cannot be reduced to the simple narrative of a “Korean artist’s entry into the U.S. market.” Rather, it reveals how the nonlinear, affective logic of a city-culture like Seoul can be reframed and regenerated into a new artistic language through the mediating body of the artist.
 
This exhibition, realized in Los Angeles in the summer of 2025, stands as one of the most compelling examples of how “Global K-Art” might formulate new syntax: not merely by presenting Korean content to the world, but by restructuring the very language of contemporary art itself.