PKM Gallery | Bartleby Bickle & Meursault are pleased to present The End by Hyunjhin Baik (born 1972), the artist's first work in the medium of film. Shown in a space purposely reconfigured for its screening, the 33-minute film is being presented as a work of visual art in a gallery context for the first time.

Baik is perhaps better known as the vocalist for the acclaimed alternative band UHUHBOO Project and, in recent years, as a visual artist whose paintings and drawings have garnerned considerable attention for their eclectic, idiosyncratic visual language and sensibility. Demonstrating the experimental, unconventional stance that underlies all of Baik's varied activities, The End brings together some of the most talented character actors in Korean cinema today—Hae-il Park, Ji-won Uhm, So-ri Moon, Kwang-rok Oh, Seung-beom Ryu, and Hak-seon Kim—in a film of four fragmentary episodes that eschew schematic plot in favor of a narrative structure that is enigmatic and aleatory, full of meandering loose ends as well as abrupt dead ends.

In a reversal of the usual cinematic progression, the phrase "THE END," typically coming at the conclusion of the closing credits, begins each of the four episodes. But this formal device, as with all the elements of technical experimentation in this work (which evinces the artist's familiarity with the cinematic language pioneered by such figures as Godard, Fassbinder, and Cassavetes, among others) exists as frame and support. The work as a whole constitutes a perplexing yet compelling portraiture—almost in the classical sense, though through the medium of the moving image—of four characters variously agitated, anguished, resigned, or sometimes all three, by some unspecified crisis of love or faith, or simply the sheer inscrutability of life. It is a visual and psychological collage deftly melding moments of absurd comedy, mundane horror, and existential melodrama that we recognize as essentially true.

This is Hyunjhin Baik's first exhibition with PKM Gallery | Bartleby Bickle & Meursault. On the occasion of the showing of The End: The Linear Version at PKM Gallery, the artist will also hang two paintings and two new drawings in the project space of Bartleby Bickle & Meursault. In the spring of 2011, the artist will have a solo show of new paintings and drawings at PKM Gallery | Bartleby Bickle & Meursault.

Organized by JAMES B. LEE
Bartleby Bickle & Meursault
for PKM Gallery

Screening Time    Monday – Friday
10:30 | 11:30 | 14:30 | 15:30 | 16:30