Venue: Perigee Gallery

Press release

〈Ordinary, Really Ordinary〉
- Seung Oh Shin (Perigee Gallery Director)

It is difficult to define a person or to describe their personality with one word. Especially it is even more difficult to an artist like Hyunjin Bek who has actively worked in diverse fields like art, music, film, etc. Surely his activities in these diverse fields gather to form Hyunjin Bek but his works and activities are just vaguely felt and do not fall into the minds easily. In a conversation about the work and his plan for this exhibition, he said, “It is difficult to interpret what I represented through this work into words.” In this respect, although this introduction is my best attempt to understand his work, it exists at a point just opposite to his work or makes his work more uncertain.

This text focuses on activities of Hyunjin Bek in the field of visual art among activities in many other fields. His work is mainly painting, projecting upon and reflecting the reality that the artist sees and experiences through the touch of his brushes. He certainly does not miss the insignificant and ordinary sense of everyday life in his painting. However, his painting is not about representing certain images but more about painting for painting’s sake. He does not express a negative or sublime viewpoint on reality in his painting but rather some personal and subjective ideas, so that his painting almost looks like a practice for self-realization. Thus, his way of communication can be seen as not a familiar explanation but as a trigger, thrown by his work. In other words, the medium of painting to Hyunjin Bek is a means of clearly delivering what he has inside him more than any other medium. Yet - to audiences - his work scatters when they try to focus on one thing, and appears again when focus is scattered. His work is literally unclear and vague.

What is his work in this exhibition like? The title of this exhibition is In the Neighborhood. It is related to the work, UnemploymentBankruptcyDivorceDebtSuicide Rest Stop - that will be shown for the Korea Artist Prize 2017, in the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art- with two poems like a binocular twin. The title of both exhibitions uses the title of poems that the artist wrote. There is a text about UnemploymentBankruptcyDivorceDebtSuicide Rest Stop by another critic, so that you can refer to it if there is any interest. This text focuses on In the Neighborhood by starting from the artist’s poems. The poem describes the life of an adult in sequence - who can easily be found in the general newspapers - and depicts events and activities of a friend of a person who committed suicide while he walks on the street after the funeral. The story may seem to be portrayed as being in the era of neoliberalism, and directly tells about today’s miserable and tired reality. However, the artist says, “The general atmosphere of the poems is formed by the rough and lonesome conditions of life in South Korea. This atmosphere is a general environment in the world, and I try not to embellish it, but look at it with a disinterested attitude.” Let us examine the composition of the exhibition to understand the world he talks about and his work.

 

+http://www.perigee.co.kr/gallery/exhibitions/view/2017/116#about_detail_en