Gagosian Brings Unseen Nam June Paik Works Home to Seoul

Nam June Paik 1932-2006, South Korea Follow +

Twenty years on from his death, a partnership between Gagosian and the Nam June Paik Estate is set to bring works by the father of video art home to Seoul.

On view from 1 April, Rewind/Repeat is a career-spanning exhibition of rarely or never seen works. It will be housed in APMA Cabinet, the sleek, David Chipperfield-designed project space within the headquarters of South Korean beauty brand, Amorepacific.

The show will offer a glimpse into Paik’s playful, experimental mind, juxtaposing his pioneering 1960s works with later 21st-century experiments that transformed television, robotics, and performance into art.

“In every way he was distinctive,” John G. Hanhardt, curator of Paik’s 2022 exhibition, Art in Process, told Ocula ahead of that show’s opening. “His clothing, his sense of humour, the way he would shift through different languages, but most importantly, his brilliance. He was deeply informed, deeply thoughtful, and engaged.”

Among Rewind/Repeat’s showstoppers will be TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969), a sheer vinyl garment fitted with two tiny televisions, made for the musician Charlotte Moorman. As Moorman played her cello, the images on the screens shifted and shimmered, turning the human body into a living interface for technology. 

Another of Paik’s early experiments, Media Sandwich (1961–64), reveals the genesis of his radical approach: found objects, electronics, and a refusal to accept traditional artistic boundaries—a practice that would go on to reshape contemporary art for generations.

“He wanted television as an artist’s medium to be as diverse, as complex, as entertaining, and as infinite in its possibilities as possible,” Hanhardt said in 2022. “That’s why he created these grand experiments in live television alongside his family of robots, humanising technology.”

Later pieces will include Bakelite Robot (2003), a bricolage of vintage radios adapted to display video clips from sci-fi films, robot toys, and Paik’s earlier experiments. 

This will be joined by Gold TV Buddha (2005), in which a gilded Buddha meditates before a closed-circuit television, offering a quiet, ironic dialogue between spirituality and media.