Nam June Paik “Becoming Robot”
Asia Society and Museum
This event has ended.
Asia Society Museum presents the first major institutional exhibition of Korean American video artist Nam June Paik in New York in more than a decade. Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot explores the artist’s visionary use of new technologies, and the lasting impact his singular contributions have had on the development and appreciation of new media art.
The exhibition highlights Paik’s lifelong interest in humanizing technology and his prescient view of how technological innovations would become an integral aspect of our daily lives. Known as the “father of video art,” Paik envisioned the possibilities of an Internet-like network and coined the term “electronic superhighway” in 1974.
The exhibition includes a number of rarely shown works as well as some works never before exhibited in the United States. In addition, drawings and sculptures from his estate, as well as objects and ephemera on loan from the newly formed Nam June Paik Archive housed within the Smithsonian American Art Museum are on first time view.
Becoming Robot focuses on three areas of the artist’s career: Paik’s artistic and working methods with an emphasis on his process; his philosophy toward technology, especially the relationship of technology with the body; and the intersection of technology and culture.
Works on view illustrate Paik’s efforts to redefine fine art and to blur earlier distinctions between science and popular culture by creating art with mediums previously associated with mass entertainment and scientific discovery.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated exhibition catalogue edited by Melissa Chiu and Michelle Yun, which includes newly commissioned texts by Kenzo Digital, John Godfrey, Christian Jankowski, Jon Kessler, John Maeda, Bill Viola, and Yoko Ono, in addition to never-before-published writings from the recently established Nam June Paik Archives, Smithsonian American Art Museum. The exhibition is organized by Asia Society Museum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Michelle Yun.
Media
Schedule
from September 05, 2014 to January 04, 2015