Nam June Paik

signed and executed circa late 1990's

Gallery Interart, Seoul
Acquired directly from the above by the current owner

Gilding to the Buddha largely lost, with oxidation to metal underneath, which is inherent to the medium. Various age/shrinkage cracks and scratches on the elephant, including the trunk, legs and torso, some of which have been retouched. Sporadic patches of paint loss on elephant, mainly left hind leg, ears and trusks. Small clusters of woodworm holes are found on one side of the elephant as well. The CD that was originally glued onto the Buddha is detached along with the paint on that region.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Nam June Paik is frequently referred to as the 'father' of video art and he is well-known for his creative and entertaining works. Born in Seoul in 1932, Paik fled the Korean War in 1950 with his family, first to Hong Kong, and then to Tokyo. He graduated from Tokyo University in 1956 with Honours in art and music history after which he moved to Germany, first to study in Munich and then at the Conservatory of Music in Freiburg, where he studied composition. Paik moved to New York in 1964, and remained in the US until his death in 2006.

 

Paik's initial creative endeavours were pieces of action music, which he started making while in Germany in 1959, in which he included everyday noises and sounds in his compositions. He would also make appearances that amounted to what would later be considered as performance art. Paik became influenced by the experimental music ideas of John Cage and the theatrical multi-media experiments of the Fluxus group, which he joined. Fluxus was an international postwar movement of artists - many of whom were influenced by the earlier work of Duchamp and Dada - who sought to break down the barriers between high art and everyday life. The group is often considered "anti-art" in its sometimes-violent renunciation of conventional definitions of the art object.

 

Paik's first solo-show, Exposition of Music-Electronic Television, stunned the art world in 1963. Among the exhibits were a dozen randomly scattered television sets, their screen images deliberately distorted with magnets. Paik was first drawn to video in the context of his music; it was the random quality of the television soundtrack that initially appealed to him. He would later go on to embrace, if not pioneer, most aspects of video art, and for over three decades was a provocative and prophetic spokesman for new uses of television technology and for the relevance of TV to art.

"I knew there was something to be done in television and nobody else was doing it, so I said 'why not make it my job?'" Paik once remarked in a 1975 interview with New Yorker magazine.

 

From 1963, he used television sets in startling constructions for performances (for example the using a television as a cello, bra, or glasses) and designed installations composed of televisions transformed into aquariums, and stacked as pyramids. Paik also made television chairs and many versions of television robots. He combined fast-paced video clips, often dramatically colourised, in high-energy montages programmed over several television monitors. The flowing frames of the individual images in his video works resemble notes of music played by a musician: when viewing his video work it is not difficult to grasp the similarities to modern Western music.

 

Slowly but surely, Paik climbed his way toward international fame with his large-scale, cutting-edge installations that wielded the television set in innovative and unpredictable ways, forcing us to rethink the existentialism of this quotidian electronic device.

 

He is considered to have been the author of the phrase "Information Superhighway", which he used in a Rockefeller Foundation paper in 1974. He once stated, "I thought: if you create a highway, then people are going to invent cars. That's dialectics. If you create electronic highways, something has to happen." [1]

 

The current work, Watching Buddha is an enigmatic piece, comprising a Buddha sculpture, tied down with rope to the rear end of a model of a baby elephant. Meeting the gaze of Buddha is a television set, balanced backwards on top of the elephant's head, showing the Buddha's own image, filmed by a camera connected to the TV screen by wires and supported by a tripod positioned to one side of the elephant. As the Buddha seemingly contemplates it's own image, so too does the image of the Buddha on the TV screen stare back towards itself, creating an infinite loop.

 

The work is one of a number of works that draw similarities with one of Paik's most famous works, TV Buddha (1974), which also consists of a Buddha statue gazing at his own image on a TV screen, being projected there by a closed circuit video camera. This ironic neo-Dada vision of the Buddha silently contemplating its own televised image was one of the first video installations exhibited in New York's Museum of Modern Art's 'Projects' series, which highlighted innovations in art.

 

As a representative work that fundamentally changed art and human perception, Paik's TV Buddha foretold the emergence of modern two-way communication. In this work, Buddha meditates on his own image, reproduced electronically on a monitor, not unlike the recent phenomenon of videoconferencing software, which allows people to communicate on their computers across the internet. 

 

Drawing on the religious icon of the Buddha, Paik connects tradition with modern technology, the continuous loop between the two symbolising the dependence of one on the other. As with much of Paik's work, one is made to reflect upon the spiritual state of humanity, as well as the nature of art.

 

This outside observation of an inner meditation could be interpreted as a form of media worship, reflecting modern society's obsession with the media, and its now inability to exist without television. The interrelationship of the Buddha and the monitor can be seen as a metaphor for an evolution of modern art whereby non-artistic elements are now critical aspects that form the foundation of art.

 

The work of Nam June Paik has affected a monumental flux in the creative possibilities of postmodern contemporary art. To say that he has revolutionized the realm of digital art is a gross understatement. His prolific body of work has made an indelible impact on the development and prevalence of video art today. He redefined the television set into an artistic medium and thus introduced the idea that anything could be reinterpreted and bestowed with aesthetic value.

 

Public collections around the world which hold his work include Ackland Art Museum (University of North Carolina), the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, New York), the Art Museum of the Americas (Washington D.C.), DaimlerChrysler Collection (Berlin), Fukuoka Art Museum (Fukuoka, Japan), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington D.C.), the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Kunsthalle zu Kiel (Germany), Kunstmuseum St.Gallen (Switzerland), Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Dusseldorf, Germany), Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst (Aachen, Germany), Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museum Wiesbaden (Germany), the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), the National Museum of Contemporary Art (Athens, Greece), Palazzo Cavour (Turin, Italy), the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Schleswig-Holstein Museums (Germany), the Smart Museum of Art (University of Chicago), Smith College Museum of Art (Massachusetts), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington D.C.), the Stuart Collection (University of California, San Diego), and the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, Minnesota).

[1] http://netart.incubadora.fapesp.br/portal/midias/paik.htm