Nam June Paik (1932-2006), who was born in what is now South Korea, spent most of his life in Japan, Germany, and the United States. Drawing from both Eastern and Western philosophies and traditions, his art transcends national borders while celebrating cultural differences. This retrospective retraces Paik’s five-decade career as the first global and transnational artist to foresee the potential impacts of mass media and new technology on the visual arts.
In both his art and life, Paik was playfully rebellious. Trained as a classical composer, he sought to expand the parameters of music and art, creating unconventional performances and actions that he termed “a-music” or “not not music.” An avid consumer of television, literature, philosophy, and news, he channeled and translated these sources in subversive and humorous ways. His radical artistic interventions and idiosyncratic aphorisms blend languages and defy genres. Paik wanted to occupy uncharted artistic territory–to create works that were, in his words, “95% new.” A key participant in the avant-garde Fluxus movement of the 1960s, he envisioned and realized a multidisciplinary future through his musical objects and scores, a family of TV robots, groundbreaking video art, immersive installations, live broadcasts, and participatory works. A frequent collaborator, he worked internationally with artists across disciplines, including Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Charlotte Moorman; their formative relationships are represented here through dedicated galleries.
Exhibiting more than two hundred works from across Paik’s career and drawing extensively from SFMOMA’s collection, this presentation compromises two chrnological cycles of thematic galleries. It culminates in the restaging of Paik’s largest work, Sistine Chapel (1993), in which his experimental, innovative, and profound yet entertaining approach to art is on full display.
Major support for Nam June Paik is provided by Dana and Bob Emery.
Generous support is provided by Lionel F. Conacher and Joan T. Dea, Debbie and Andy Rachleff, and Pat Wilson.
This exhibition is made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Additional support is provided by Eleanor and Francis Shen.