About
Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body’s new membrane of existence.
—Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik (1932–2006) brought the television to fine art, treating it as a tactile and multisensory medium and object. Trained as a classical pianist, he came into contact with protagonists of the counterculture and avant-garde movements of the 1960s through his early interests in composition and performance, and this engagement profoundly shaped his outlook at a time when electronic images were becoming increasingly present in everyday life. His groundbreaking work is considered seminal to the development of video art.
Born in Seoul, Paik fled with his family in 1950 to escape the Korean War, traveling first to Hong Kong and then to Japan. After graduating from the University of Tokyo in 1956, he moved to West Germany to continue his studies. There he met the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, as well as the conceptual artists George Maciunas and Joseph Beuys, all of whom deeply affected his thoughts on performance. He joined the Fluxus group in 1962 and moved from the manual manipulation of audiotapes to experimenting with television sets and their screens. Two years later, by this time living in New York, Paik met the cellist Charlotte Moorman, a central figure of the city’s avant-garde, and the two began a collaboration that would last until her death in 1991. Paik created many of his most well-known works for Moorman, including TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969) and TV-Cello (1971).
Prior to moving to the United States, Paik had met the engineer Shuya Abe, who would also become a longtime collaborator as well as his assistant. Abe helped Paik make his first robot, Robot K-456, in 1964. Composed of metal fragments, fabric, a data recorder, and a loudspeaker that plays recordings of speeches by John F. Kennedy, Robot K-456 captures Paik’s interest in merging popular media and technology with human traits; possessing abstracted breasts and penis, it moves on wheels and is programmed to periodically defecate beans. Paik showed this remote-controlled robot in several exhibitions and performances in New York throughout the 1960s. In 1982, during his first major museum exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he took Robot K-456 out into the street to orchestrate an “accident”: the robot walked down Madison Avenue and was hit by a car as it attempted to cross 75th Street. For Paik, this spectacle represented a “catastrophe of technology in the twentieth century.”
Alongside his robotic works, Paik maintained a dynamic drawing practice, both in works on paper and in multimedia sculptures and installations. His modified television sets, in particular, combine the moving image with the free, expressive gesture of abstraction; using brightly colored markers, paints, and other materials, Paik would add expressive layers to the screens. Lion (2005), a monumental assemblage comprising twenty-eight television screens and a hand-painted guardian lion sculpture framed within a wooden arch, displays fast-paced montages of flowers, animals, and fish, as well as footage of lions and Merce Cunningham dancing. Lion is emblematic of Paik’s late style, in which he often reflected upon the many artists and performers who influenced his oeuvre.
Photo: Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Stock Photo
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Exhibitions
Nam June Paik: Art in Process: Part One
On the occasion of Nam June Paik: Art in Process: Part One, curator John G. Hanhardt and Nam June Paik Estate curator Jon Huffman discuss the survey of works spanning the artist’s career.
Reading Nam June Paik
Earlier this year, MIT Press released We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik. Here Gregory Zinman, coeditor of the book along with John Hanhardt and Edith Decker-Phillips, writes about his first exposure to the artist’s archives, the discoveries made there, and the relationship between Paik’s writings and his larger practice.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Winter 2019
The Winter 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a selection from Christopher Wool’s Westtexaspsychosculpture series on its cover.
Time by Dance by Paik
Gillian Jakab considers the role of choreography in Nam June Paik’s 1989 video installation Fin de Siècle II.
Life and Technology: The Binary of Nam June Paik
Alexander Wolf explores the intersection of life and technology as it exists in the work of Nam June Paik, revealing the artist’s ability to balance technological concerns with humanity through music, performance, expressive painting, and images from nature.
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Art Fair
Art Basel Hong Kong 2024
March 27–30, 2024
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
www.artbasel.com
Gagosian is participating in Art Basel Hong Kong 2024 with a selection of works by international contemporary artists. The works on view, which embrace a dizzying variety of subjects and approaches, see the participating artists identify fresh ways to disrupt established histories of abstraction and figuration, and instill sculptural and painterly representations of the natural world with complex cultural significance.
Sarah Sze, Turning and Turning, 2024 © Sarah Sze. Photo: Maris Hutchinson
Art Fair
ART SG 2024
January 19–21, 2024, booth BC06
Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre, Singapore
artsg.com
Gagosian is pleased to participate in the second edition of ART SG, with a selection of works by international contemporary artists including Harold Ancart, Georg Baselitz, Ashley Bickerton, Amoako Boafo, Dan Colen, Edmund de Waal, Nan Goldin, Lauren Halsey, Hao Liang, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, Tetsuya Ishida, Alex Israel, Donald Judd, Y.Z. Kami, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Rick Lowe, Takashi Murakami, Takashi Murakami & Virgil Abloh, Nam June Paik, Ed Ruscha, Jim Shaw, Alexandria Smith, Spencer Sweeney, Stanley Whitney, Jonas Wood, and Zeng Fanzhi. The works on view, which embrace a wide variety of subjects and approaches, find artists infusing traditional genres such as history painting, portraiture, and landscape with new and surprising ideas that traverse cultural and temporal boundaries.
Gagosian’s booth at ART SG 2024. Artwork, left to right: © ADAGP, Paris, 2024, © Jonas Wood, © Rick Lowe Studio. Photo: Ringo Cheung
Art Fair
ART SG FILM 2024
Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut
January 18–21, 2024, 2pm daily
ArtScience Cinema, Singapore
artsg.com
Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut’s video Waiting for Commercials, 1966–72 (1992) features in ART SG FILM 2024, a program within the fair dedicated to showcasing new and experimental filmmaking practices, as well as art historically resonant works, particularly by artists and practitioners from around the Southeast Asia and Asia Pacific regions. Curated by Sam I-shan and copresented with the ArtScience Museum, this year’s program, Embodied Presences, gathers works addressing the body’s expressive potential. Organized into four hour-long daily screenings—Movement in Space (11am), Voice and Being (12:30pm), The Worldly and Otherworldly (2pm), and Future Shock: The End of Eternity (3:30pm)—it plays at ArtScience Museum’s cinema. Included in The Worldly and Otherworldly, Waiting for Commercials, 1966–72, an uproarious compilation of Japanese TV ads, is an early example of Paik’s use of appropriated broadcast imagery and was originally produced to accompany a performance work of the same title featuring Charlotte Moorman. The event is free to attend on a first-come, first-served basis.
Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut, Waiting for Commercials, 1966–72, 1992 (still) © Nam June Paik Estate and © Estate of Jud Yalkut. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Museum Exhibitions
On View
Nam June Paik
The Miami Years
Through August 16, 2024
Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, Florida
thebass.org
Nam June Paik: The Miami Years explores the artist’s little-known connection to Miami Beach and the surrounding south Florida community. Organized around the Bass Museum’s recent acquisition of his TV Cello (2003), it examines the innovative ways Paik used communication and media technologies in his work. The exhibition also includes Notations, a series of installations and performances by three contemporary artists whose practices engage with and further Paik’s experimentations with technology.
Installation view, Nam June Paik: The Miami Years, Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, Florida, October 4, 2023–August 16, 2024 © Nam June Paik Estate. Photo: Zaire Aranguren, courtesy Bass Museum of Art
Closed
The Dream of the Museum
November 11, 2021–April 23, 2023
M+, Hong Kong
www.mplus.org.hk
The Dream of the Museum examines the concept of found objects to show how artists use cultures as source material to update tradition. Beginning with four pioneers of contemporary art—Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Yoko Ono, and Nam June Paik—the exhibition brings together work by twenty-seven artists from across geographies and generations, including Hao Liang and Andy Warhol, who explore chance and found objects in their work.
Hao Liang, Eight Views of Xiaoxiang—Dazzle, 2015 © Hao Liang. Photo: courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing
Closed
America. Entre rêves et réalités
La collection du Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Collection
June 9–September 11, 2022
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Canada
www.mnbaq.org
Featuring more than a hundred paintings, photographs, sculptures, and video works drawn from the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, this exhibition, whose title translates to America. Between Dreams and Realities, offers a broad overview of modern and contemporary American art. Organized thematically, it looks carefully and critically at the notion of the American dream and uncovers how artists have variously grappled with questions of identity, the challenges of globalization, the realities of everyday life in America, and the complexities of its technological and political revolutions. Work by Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Sally Mann, Man Ray, Brice Marden, Nam June Paik, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and Mary Weatherford is included.
Mary Weatherford, Engine, 2014, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC © Mary Weatherford. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio
Closed
Nam June Paik
The Future Is Now
December 10, 2021–March 27, 2022
National Gallery Singapore
www.nationalgallery.sg
This major exhibition brings together more than two hundred works from throughout Nam June Paik’s five-decade career—from robots made from old TV screens, to his innovative video works, and all-encompassing room-size installations. The exhibition looks at his close collaborations with Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Charlotte Moorman, and others. This exhibition originated at the Tate Modern in London.
Nam June Paik, One Candle, 2004 © Estate of Nam June Paik. Photo: Jon Huffman