Humor Has It looks into Fluxus artists and Paik who challenged the traditional values of society and institutional art, from an angle of humor. Breaking boundaries, getting together freely, challenging social taboo, and counterattacking rules and norms, these characteristics are well represented by Paik’s witty but revolutionary ideas and practices. Primarily drawing on Nam June Paik Art Center’s foremost resource, that is, its archives, this exhibition was an outcome of long-term cooperation with Lithuania’s cultural center and embassy, and the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center, in commemoration of the 90th anniversary of Fluxus artist George Maciunas.

This exhibition catalogue overviews how Fluxus is not limited to Paik’s early period, but runs through his whole work including the later broadcast and satellite projects (Park Sang Ae), and scours through the larger picture of Fluxus and its major artists to lay a clear art historical pathway for understanding their core (Woo Jung-Ah). It also approaches Paik as a strategist who skidded down the slopes of internationalism and imperialism through his Fluxus activities (Hyejin Park), makes a focused analysis of event scores in the framework of humor (Jung Yunhoe), and uses Japan as a lens to reflect on the Fluxus era, which Paik spent living variously in Europe, the US, and Asia (Yook Youngshin). And this book adopted a form carrying on the Fluxus tradition of publishing experiments, and based on mail art, the images of the exhibited works were produced as a set of postcards. It is expected that, after the exhibition’s closure, Paik’s Fluxus will continue to spread in your everyday lives.