The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

NAM JUNE PAIK - WHIMSICAL ENCOUNTERS, WITHOUT END A giant amongst his peers in pioneering performance, video art and multimedia exploration, Nam June Paik has been at the forefront of innovative expression for some forty years. He is an artist with an indefatigable, adventurous spirit. Paik's beliefs in a global society where many cultures coalesce, where past and present are in constant dialogue, and where there is no division between art and life or between art and technology have been legendary constants in his work. Paik represents one of those talents that can never be still. Conceptually, his art is transformative, actively disrupting conventional usages of music composition and performance within television and film. Engaging with his viewers, the artist's installations and video objects are ambitious technological landscapes or curious icons, which are nevertheless deeply humanistic. The moving film images he collages often have a popularist edge. They predate music video clips, while the assemblages of obsolete TV sets and radios, sometimes juxtaposed with other found objects, are splendid oddities. He is a recycler, a brico!eur of consumer society's aural and visual detritus. Importantly, Paik is also one step ahead of his time, meeting new challenges with brilliant and inspiring solutions. The elements 1989 Electronic sculpture 195 x 126 x 65cm The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art Purchased 1999 with funds from The Myer Foundation A project of the Sidney Myer Centenary Celebration 1899-1999 Gift through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery 78 APT2002 TV cello (detail) 2000 Paik's considerable research (which covers the aesthetics of music, theories of time, an investigation into radar, and the development of an electronic 'super highway') is synthesised w ith his keen appreciation of popular culture at its most youthful and vibrant. Hence, his multi-channel video sculptures would not be out of place as shrines in today's video arcades, and his 'robots' are intentionally humorous and grotesque. Partly an amalgam of Dada's absurd performance character 'Ubu Roi' from the early twentieth century and the widely recognised robots of science fiction, Paik's constructions are portraits to keep humankind alert to its foibles. Until relatively recently he travelled constantly, inspiring younger artists and pushing the envelope of his own complex explorations. This mobility has been paralleled with virtual journeying on an 'electronic super highway'. 1 The appetite for travel commenced when he left his birthplace in South Korea as an adolescent and studied music, principally in Germany, engaging there with John Cage and the Fluxus group. In fact, a large measure of Paik's 'life in art grew out of the politics and anti-art movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s'. 2 He was a participant in the hilarious, highly disruptive Fluxus concerts and music festivals in Wiesbaden and elsewhere in Germany during the early sixties, and at the same time he studied the latest developments in video technology in Japan. He built his first robot with electronic engineer Shuya Abe at this time, and together in 1969 they came up with the Paik-Abe video synthesiser, 'a somewhat ramshackle mechanism'. 3 Nam June Paik South Korea/United States b.1932 TV cello 2000 Electronic sculpture 232.2 x 75 x 55cm (overall) The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art Purchased 2002 with funds from The Myer Foundation A project of the Sidney Myer Centenary Celebration 1899-1999 Gift through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery