Questions for the Future:
Revisiting Nam June Paik

Would you please briefly introduce yourself?
Hello, my name is Namhee Park; I work at the Nam June Paik Art Center. As this year marks the 20th anniversary of Nam June Paik's passing, the Nam June Paik Art Center is preparing a host of events to raise awareness about him.

Everyone will have heard the name Nam June Paik at least once at some point. But could you briefly describe who he was and the reasons why his work is regarded as a turning point in 20th-century art history?
The name Nam June Paik is likely familiar to many. He is referred to as an artistic genius described by a vast array of epithets such as "artist," "scientist," "developer," and "eccentric." Born in Seoul in 1932, he was a media artist who was active on the global stage, traveling through Korea, Japan, Germany, and the United States until his death in Miami in 2006.

The art of Nam June Paik is regarded as being situated at a significant watershed in 20th-century art history because he pioneered a new artistic form known as video art. It began with his first solo exhibition, Exhibition of Music – Electronic Television, held in Wuppertal, Germany, in 1963. This exhibition is considered one of the first attempts to present television as an artistic medium and is regarded as an historic moment heralding the birth of video art.

From that point on, Paik continuously experimented with the functions of television and expanded its possibilities. He developed the video synthesizer to transform a medium that merely conveyed information one-sidedly, into a tool that interacted with the audience, opening the way to produce and transform images in new ways. In 1964, he pioneered a new artistic field in which humans and machines coexisted when he presented a performance featuring a robot, he had built himself.

Another vital characteristic when discussing Nam June Paik is that he was an artist who connected the world through media. Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, released in 1984, was an international live broadcast project connecting various regions, including New York and Paris, via satellite. Having artists in different localities perform and communicate on a single stage demonstrated that art and the world can be connected real-time through technology. This work is also regarded as a cultural-historical event that transcends art history to present a new way in which the world could communicate. I understand that the Nam June Paik Art Center possesses one of the most important collections of his work in the world. Of this, could you introduce about four or five representative pieces, from the collection, that you would like to recommend as must-see works?
I am delighted that such important works by Nam June Paik are in our museum's collection. We have 283 works in the collection and 2,285 items in the video archive. Among these many works, one that serves best to understand the artist Nam June Paik is The Moon Is the Oldest TV, produced in 1965.

  This piece shows the phases of the moon over time on 12 television monitors. While it may appear simple at first glance, it is a symbolic work that connects video to "the art of time." It links the abstract concept of time with the natural order of the lunar cycle and visualizes this within the medium of television.

Notably, the moon on the screen is not a video of the actual moon. It is an image created by transforming the electron beam of a cathode ray tube (CRT) television into a magnetic field, representing a new realization of natural changes through electronic and physical manipulation. The cycle from the crescent moon to the full moon and then to the waning moon allows us to perceive the flow of time, which we often experience unconsciously in our daily lives, in a new way.

The significance of this piece lies in how it reveals Nam June Paik's production methods and thought processes. The modern medium of electronic technology and the Eastern cyclical view of time are here naturally combined within a single work, and it is precisely at this point that one can glimpse the essence of Nam June Paik's art. For this reason, The Moon Is the Oldest TV is one of our representative pieces of the collection that we consider incredibly important.
The second work I would like to introduce is TV Fish. It is a representative work that best demonstrates Nam June Paik's unique humor and playful spirit. Nam June Paik believed that art does not necessarily have to be solemn and difficult but should provide the audience with stimulation and enjoyment.
  This installation piece combines a fish tank containing live fish with television monitors. Various video clips, including performances by Merce Cunningham, flow across the monitors while fish swim about freely in front of them. This depicts life and technology, nature and media, coexisting in a single space endlessly creating new scenes.

Nam June Paik believed that just as stained glass in a cathedral constantly reveals different manifestations depending on the light, an art museum should also be a living, dynamic space. TV Fish is a work most vividly demonstrating this philosophy and is one of our center's representative collection pieces to welcome visitors.

The third work I would like to introduce is called The Reinstatement of Genghis Khan (1993). I believe it goes beyond being a mere representative piece of art; it is the one artwork that most symbolically demonstrates the kind of artist Nam June Paik was. It is also part of our museum's collection and was one of the main works exhibited alongside Hans Haacke at the German Pavilion of the 1993 Venice Biennale, when the German Pavilion won the Golden Lion Award. This piece makes us reflect not only on its significance in art history but also on Nam June Paik’s reasoning for summoning the figure of Genghis Khan. Nam June Paik went to Germany to study in 1956 and met John Cage at the Darmstadt International Summer Course for Contemporary Music in 1958. He later recalled the meeting being so decisive in that he was able to divide his life into before and after meeting John Cage.

What is interesting here is that the ‘Asian’ Nam June Paik essentially was led to rediscover the value of Zen thought and Eastern philosophy through John Cage, a Westerner. The experience served as a defining moment causing Paik to re-examine his own cultural identity. He would then continue his work challenging the existing Western-centric art order to such an extent that he called himself a "cultural terrorist from the East."

As part of this process, the figure Paik focused on was none other than Genghis Khan. To him, Genghis Khan was not merely a historical figure, but a symbol of someone who in traversing the East and West connected civilizations and cultures. In this sense, The Rehabilitation of Genghis Khan can be described as a self-portrait projecting Paik's own identity through Genghis Khan, as well as a work that embodies his artistic philosophy of freely crossing cultural boundaries.

When you look at the piece, you see Genghis Khan speeding along in a car. He is wearing a helmet, his body holds a monitor inside, and on his back, you can see a variety of images and symbols. This aligns with the concept of the 'Electronic Superhighway' proposed by Paik in 1974. He predicted that media technology would connect the entire world into a single network transcending borders and cultures, and The Rehabilitation of Genghis Khan can be seen as a work that symbolically embodies Nam June Paik himself racing toward that future.

And the final work I would like to introduce is TV Buddha (1974), a representative work by Paik and one of his most widely known pieces internationally. At first sight, this installation appears quite meditative and serene, but in fact, it is a piece whose meaning is continuously being expanded through participation of its viewers. Created in 1974, this work was later acquired by the Stedelijk Museum and established itself as one of Paik's masterpieces.

The work consists of a very simple arrangement. A Buddha statue is seen gazing at a television displaying its own image, as a camera installed next to the television films the statue in real time, transmitting the footage back to the screen. This video circulates endlessly, creating a single loop.

What is interesting is the moment when a viewer stands in front of the work. The viewer's image is also transmitted to the screen, so we are naturally placed within the same gaze as the Buddha. At that moment, we become both viewers looking at the statue and another existence on the screen. This work does not impose a single interpretation. It embodies the possibility of open interpretation: 'I could be the Buddha, the Buddha and I could exist side by side, or the act of gazing itself could represent a meditative practice.' By combining the modern technology of television with the meditative nature of Buddhism, Paik breaks down the boundaries between East and West, past and present, and technology and humanity, expanding the simplest act of 'looking' into a process of contemplation and religious practice.

Therefore, TV Buddha is not merely a work that combines television and a Buddha statue; it can be considered one of Paik's representative works prompting new reflection on the relationships between technology and humanity, art and religion, and the audience and the artwork. For me, it is one of the most precious works in the Nam June Paik Art Center collection and the piece that makes me think most deeply about the artist Nam June Paik.

Nam June Paik made use of various machines, such as television sets, video clips, synthesizers, and robots, as the primary media for his works, but the core element among them was television. In your opinion, what was the reason for choosing television, a medium rarely used in art at the time?
Well, I believe Paik chose television because it was the most powerful mass medium of that era. Radio and television were the most important channels through which people understood the world and connected with one another. In particular, because television was a medium capable of simultaneously transmitting images and sound, it must have appeared to Paik as a new artistic material with infinite possibilities.

However, Paik's interest was not limited solely to the technical appeal of television. He posed the question: why must television always deliver messages only one way? Why must we merely stare at the screen? Why can we not interact with television? This critical perspective was both a critique of the existing broadcasting system and an experiment proposing a new mode of communication.

This interest in fact originated from electronic music. While studying electronic music in Germany, Paik explored how electronic technology could transform the modes of artistic expression, and this interest naturally expanded to electronic media in general. Of these, television was the most popular medium with great potential for experimentation, and I believe it became a key tool for expanding his experiments, which began with electronic music, into visual arts.

Director Park, you once stated in an interview that Nam June Paik was already a prophet of the age of AI. How should we understand this statement?
Actually, rather than this being an interpretation I deduced myself, it is a perspective I came to adopt through the Nam June Paik Retrospective held at the Tate Modern in 2019. The materials and videos released alongside the exhibition summarized and introduced the fact that Paik was an artist who foresaw today's digital society from various perspectives. Upon reading that, I, too, came to believe that "this is truly the case." So, I came to cite that perception in the interview.

A representative example of this is the concept of the "Electronic Superhighway" proposed by Paik in 1974. At that time, it was an era where it was difficult to even imagine the entire world being connected by a single network, let alone the Internet. However, Paik described a future where the world is connected in real-time through electronic media, and where information and culture flowed freely. Later, as the World Wide Web (WWW) was proposed in 1989 and the Internet rapidly spread across the globe throughout the 1990s, the vision envisioned by Paik became a reality. In that sense, I believe his “Electronic Superhighway” was not merely a product of his imagination, but a pioneering insight that remarkably foresaw the digital network society. The second point is his foresight into the new realm of art known as video. Paik had already been experimenting with television as an artistic medium since the early 1960s, and beginning in 1969, he developed the video synthesizer with Japanese engineer Shuya Abe. As this device made the real-time synthesis and transformation of various images and colors possible, video expanded beyond a mere tool for recording reality, becoming an artistic medium capable of creating unique images. While video art has established itself as a significant genre in contemporary art today, the idea of electronic images representing art in themselves was quite unfamiliar at the time. In that he discovered this potential before anyone else and realized it through actual artworks and technology, this can also be considered a pioneering vision by Nam June Paik.

The third point is that he foresaw today's global media environment. Nam June Paik predicted that someday, an era would come where one could freely choose and watch television channels from anywhere in the world. He envisioned a future where images and cultures from around the globe would be connected in real time through media. Today, anyone can create their own channel via YouTube and social media, and operate not just one, but a multitude of media channels. It is my belief that the current environment, seeing content produced in various parts of the world instantly shared across borders, represents the reality of the "Global Media Era" that Paik had envisioned.

Fourth, one of the things Nam June Paik discussed that resonates most deeply with us is his insight into environmental issues. In a piece written around 1967, he makes a statement to this effect: "Hippies know what even scientists have missed." What he was referring to was a sense of awe toward nature. He meant that while scientists were overlooking environmental issues, hippies were more sensitive to changes in nature and the environmental crisis. This story appears in the context of explaining the existence and role of the artist. Humans are ultimate beings destined to coexist with nature, yet the awareness that we are losing that relationship had already been raised. Subsequently, global crises over resources and capital, including the oil shock, followed, and these issues became increasingly important social issues.

Today, we discuss the impact of human activity and capital-centered industrial structures on the global environment through concepts such as the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene. From this perspective, the questions Nam June Paik raised in the 1960s regarding the relationship between nature, technology, and humanity resonate deeply with our current era. Therefore, I consider this to be one of the important insights from which Nam June Paik pioneered his prevision of the future.

Finally, there is the smartphone. Paik predicted that someday, an era would come where a single device would perform a wide range of functions. He foresaw that people would use this device to shop, manage their health, and even engage in daily communication. The smartphones we use today are doing exactly that. We have entered an era where a single device handles not only phone calls but also the internet, shopping, finance, healthcare, and communication. As such, most of the five futures Paik spoke of have become reality today. So, I believe we can describe the era we live in today as "the future as Nam June Paik imagined it."

As the final question for today, if there is one sentence you would like to convey to audiences encountering Nam June Paik for the first time, what would it be?’
That truly is a difficult question. There is so much to say about Nam June Paik, and his words and writings are filled with countless messages. Instead, I will answer with a quote by him that came to mind when I received this question.

“What is art? Is it the moon, or the finger pointing at the moon?” This is one of the questions Nam June Paik posed. As you look at his art, you are constantly compelled to ponder which comes first in the relationship between art and technology, and between art and society. However, Nam June Paik did not believe that there is a single fixed answer. It seems he never forgot that the moon, the finger pointing at it, and us humans looking at it are all equally important.

Rather than offering answers, Nam June Paik's art poses questions. I hope you enjoy these questions with a lighthearted attitude rather than finding them too difficult to think about. Interview & Concept: Sohee Shin
German Translation: Leslie Klatte
English Translation: Star Korea AG