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The artist’s job is to make better use of technology, not to pretend it doesn’t exist.
—Nam June Paik
Gagosian is pleased to present the second and final installment of Art in Process, a survey of works by Nam June Paik (1932–2006) spanning his career. The first part of the exhibition is on view at Gagosian’s 555 West 24th Street location through July 22, 2022, and surveys Paik’s practice as it developed over four decades through a selection of work ranging from early forays into multimedia to late paintings and video sculptures. Art in Process: Part Two is on view at Gagosian’s Park & 75 location from July 19 to August 26, 2022, and features a trio of his satellite broadcasts from the 1980s alongside a number of intimate and elegiac “late style” televisions.
Art in Process is the gallery’s second solo exhibition of Paik’s work, following the 2015 presentation of The Late Style in Hong Kong. It follows The Future Is Now, a retrospective organized by Tate Modern and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) that was presented at Tate Modern, London, and traveled to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, SFMOMA, and National Gallery Singapore in 2021 and 2022. Art in Process is curated by John G. Hanhardt, who also organized the retrospectives Nam June Paik at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1982), and Nam June Paik: Global Visionary at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2011), in addition to The Worlds of Nam June Paik at the Guggenheim Museum (2000).
Melding an early training in classical music and subsequent interest in musical composition with radical, collaborative approaches to aesthetics and performance, Paik produced multimedia works that introduced the technology of television into the realm of fine art. Born in Seoul, he moved to West Germany in 1956, where he became an influential member of the Fluxus group. Eight years later, he relocated to New York, further establishing himself as a figure in the countercultural and avant-garde movements of the 1960s. Paik’s extensive social network and international background laid the foundation for a global conception of art that straddled painting, sculpture, performance, music, and electronic imagery. An increasingly prescient and significant figure in today’s world of mass media and artificial intelligence, he cultivated moments of overlap, exchange, and symbiosis between the human body and its technological counterparts.
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Nam June Paik: Art in Process: Part One
On the occasion of Nam June Paik: Art in Process: Part One, curator John G. Hanhardt and Nam June Paik Estate curator Jon Huffman discuss the survey of works spanning the artist’s career.
Reading Nam June Paik
Earlier this year, MIT Press released We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik. Here Gregory Zinman, coeditor of the book along with John Hanhardt and Edith Decker-Phillips, writes about his first exposure to the artist’s archives, the discoveries made there, and the relationship between Paik’s writings and his larger practice.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Winter 2019
The Winter 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a selection from Christopher Wool’s Westtexaspsychosculpture series on its cover.
Time by Dance by Paik
Gillian Jakab considers the role of choreography in Nam June Paik’s 1989 video installation Fin de Siècle II.
Life and Technology: The Binary of Nam June Paik
Alexander Wolf explores the intersection of life and technology as it exists in the work of Nam June Paik, revealing the artist’s ability to balance technological concerns with humanity through music, performance, expressive painting, and images from nature.
