NAM JUNE PAIK

Nam June Paik: Rewind / Repeat is on view at the headquarters of Amorepacific, the world-renowned Korean beauty company, in the center of Seoul, and takes place in the APMA Cabinet, a project space on the ground floor of the David Chipperfield–designed building.

Paik studied classical music and art at the University of Tokyo and combined this training with a radical aesthetic approach, introducing the technology of television into the realm of fine art as early as the 1950s. Paik moved to West Germany in 1956, where he joined the Fluxus group, and eight years later relocated to New York. There, he drew on his international background and extensive network to develop a practice that incorporated painting, sculpture, performance, music, and electronic media. Although frequently referred to as the father of video art, Paik anticipated a variety of subsequent developments in media and communications, a prescience that continues to unfold as culture is shaped by emergent technologies.

In 1963 Paik began visiting Tokyo to study television and robotics. It was there that he met engineer Shuya Abe and began to explore connections between technology and the human body. TV Bra for Living Sculpture, on view at APMA Cabinet, is a clear vinyl undergarment incorporating two small black-and-white television sets housed in plexiglass boxes. The singular garment was designed for musician and performance artist Charlotte Moorman, who first wore it during a performance at the opening of the exhibition TV as a Creative Medium at Howard Wise Gallery, New York, in 1969. On that occasion, Moorman played sounds on her cello that altered the televisions’ images in various ways, helping to realize Paik’s aim of humanizing this ubiquitous device.

Another work, Bakelite Robot (2003), is composed of vintage radios acquired from thrift stores and markets, which Paik adapted to screen video footage. The dials of six of the radios have been replaced with TV monitors showing specially produced videos composed of material from sciencefiction films, recordings of vintage robot toys, and excerpts from earlier video edits. In the iconic Gold TV Buddha (2005), a late entry in the TV Buddha series (1974–2005), a gilded, painted bronze statue of Buddha meditates before a closed-circuit video camera and monitor, embodying the intersection of ancient spirituality and modern media, Eastern and Western thought.

Also on view are other projects including a carved wood “painting,” Orchestra (1991); Untitled Cage Composite, a tribute to John Cage and Merce Cunningham (both of whom collaborated with Paik and had a significant influence on Fluxus); and Media Sandwich (1961–64). This early work, one of Paik’s first installations, marks the artist’s decision to move away from musical composition and make use of electronics. It incorporates eight German electronics magazines, eight ten-inch Japanese phonograph records, and an antique rotogravure print of a man offering a message to a boy. Paik has inscribed the image with the year of its production, 1832, and the year of his own birth, a hundred years later.