1974/2002, TVs, live plants, amplifiers, speakers, 1-channel video, color, sound, 28 min., 30 sec., variable size

The work features a garden where televisions lie like blooming flowers along with lush live plants. The monitors show a video work titled <Global Groove>, which is a series of cheerful and colorful sequences of music and dance from various countries and of different genres edited in the artist’s typical style. Without a coherent narrative to combine the disparate images, the video invites audiences to view it in a simple and intuitive manner. In this garden, the presence of TV monitors is emphasized by the unusual angles at which they are placed. This leads viewers to look down at the TVs that are facing upwards or lying on the side slantingly and to watch several monitors at the same time rather than concentrate on one. A natural environment artificially created and maintained in the interior space of a museum and the television symbolizing technology, which is considered opposite to nature, are brought together and form an organic space. The electronic images coming from the TV monitors flow through the leaves to various rhythms, to become part of the ecosystem. In this way, Paik harmonizes the stimuli of the pixels that ceaselessly change and the green energy of natural objects.

1965/2002, 2 TV monitors, coil, signal generator, amplifier, condenser, timer, 1-channel video, color, silent, variable size

The work is one of Paik’s earliest experimental installation works using televisions. Signals from the generator are amplified by the amp and electric currents flow through the coils installed on the monitors. The currents flow alternatively through the two monitors controlled by switches, distorting the electric beams on them. This contorts the face of former US president Richard Nixon, shown on the monitors, and creates comical images from it. Nixon failed to effectively use media in a TV debate with John F. Kennedy in 1960, which greatly affected his loss in the election. Paik focuses on the influence of media in this work.

1963–1977/1991, 24 manipulated TVs, variable size

Consisting of 24 TV monitors, the work is one of Paik’s early TV installation works. The 24 monitors symbolize the 24 hours of a day, with each of them showing lines of different inclinations, expressing different times. Paik removed the vertical inducement device of the tube in the television to create these images, which are condensed into single electric beams and help visualize time. Made up of 24 color TV monitors, the work invites viewers to visually sense the daily passage of time in a peaceful, meditative mood.

2001, 4 CRT TVs, 1 LCD monitor, 4 radio cases, 2 bulbs, 1-channel video, color, silent, 185 x 152 x 56 cm

1973, 1-channel video, color, sound, 29 min 39 sec

Produced in cooperation with WNET, a public television station serving the New York metropolitan area, and aired first on January 30, 1974, Paik’s representative video work <Global Groove>, as its title suggests, features a series of music and dance sequences from various cultures. In this video, which begins with the author’s statement that “this is a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow when you will be able to switch on any TV station on the earth and TV guides will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book,” rock music and the drum sounds played by Navajo women correspond with each other and the traditional Korean fan dance overlaps with tap dance. Also, as represented in the combination of Beethoven’s <Moonlight Sonata> and Stockhausen’s electronic music, culturally opposing elements are given equal status and coexist in this video. Paik, by putting together such heterogeneous and conflicting elements, seeks to present a new complex cultural landscape with no national borders based on the prospect of a future globalization through TV.

2001, 2 CRT TVs, 3 LCD monitors, radios and CRT TV cases, 1-channel video, color, silent, 141 x 116 x 33 cm

Bob Hope was an American stand-up comedian, actor, singer, dancer and writer, who gained huge popularity in the 20th century. He was an all-around entertainer who actively appeared in many radio and television shows, movies and theaters. Paik made a number of works featuring celebrities including Humphrey Bogart, David Bowie, Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe, as well as Hope, which reflects his interest in the impact of mass media, the consumption of images by media, and the boundary between high art and popular art since the 1970s. In 1984, when Hope appeared in a TV show produced by Cable Soho, a group of artists based in New York, he was asked about video art and Paik by artist Jaime Davidovich who broke into a press conference taking place there. At that time, Hope had no idea about what video art was and who Paik was, but he expressed his anticipation for the future of the television to be made by experimental artists and his wish to be part of the future. As if to respond to his wish, Paik represented Bob Hope, who was a symbol of the then American broadcasting culture, with a robot made up of TV monitors through which his past and future are shown at the same time.

1988, CCTV camera, clock, 3 TV monitors, tripod, variable size

1988, 20 Quasar color monitors, metal grid, gold-painted wooden frame, 2-channel video, color, silent, 195 x 235 x 4 cm

Twenty color monitors are arranged within a splendid, antique wooden frame. These 2-channel TV monitors incessantly show abstract images that are rapidly changing. The work seems to have been titled after the Fontainebleau castle in France, which was a luxurious residence of French monarchs, and even Napoleon, and accommodates spaces where paintings are hung side by side on the walls, which became the precursor of modern galleries. Particularly, the gallery of Francis I displays paintings set in magnificent gold frames. The work embodies Paik’s forecast that the cathode ray tubes (CRT) would replace canvas as collage technique replaced oil painting.

1964, black and white photography, 40 x 59.5 cm

Paik gave a performance of his work <Zen for Film> standing in front of a running projector during the New Cinema Festival I held at Filmmakers’ Cinematheque in 1964, as shown in this photograph taken by Peter Moore. The installation work of the same title features an empty film that has not been exposed to light running through a projector: when the light passes through the film, the scratches and dust on the film are screened. Therefore, when the viewer stands in front of the projector, their shape and movement become part of the work.

1975/1999, candle, TV case, 34 x 36 x 41 cm

A lit candle is shining inside an old-fashioned TV case. Light symbolizes the dawn of human civilization, as Paik once said that “the source of light is the same as that of information. In this work, the television is a symbol of the beginning of a new civilization.

1993, TV monitor, 10 TV cases, neon tube, bicycle, diving helmet, fuel dispenser, plastic pipes, clothes, 1-channel video, color, silent, 217 x 110 x 211 cm

This work, a visual representation of the replacement of the Silk Road that connected the East and the West by broadband electronic highways, was exhibited in the German Hall during the 1993 Venice Biennale. This Genghis-Khan of the 20th century is riding a bicycle instead of a horse, wearing a diving helmet instead of armor. His body is made up of a steel fuel dispenser, with plastic pipe arms. His bike is loaded with TV cases, which are filled with symbols and characters illuminated by neon lights. The neon symbols suggest the possibility that intricate information would be condensed and transferred through electronic highways. The video displayed on the TVs features various masking techniques, transforming images from a bottle to a pyramid, from a ceramic vessel to a kettle, and so on, while abstract geometrical patterns are constantly changing from one to another. In a series of TV robots created by Paik, including <Marco Polo>, <Tangun as a Scythian King>, <Alexander the Great >, as well as this work, Paik emphasized his vision for a future with a new paradigm that would come with the advancement of software using broadband communication, breaking away from the past where those controlling transportation took power and dominated others.

1995, print on copper plate, 86 x 71 cm

Paik incorporated the concept of “electronic highways”, of which he was advocate, into this work, borrowing the shape of the Rosetta Stone, discovered in a village named Rosetta by Napoleon’s army during his expedition to Egypt. The Rosetta Stone is inscribed with the decrees promulgated by the Ptolemaic Dynasty of Egypt from BC 305 to BC 30 in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, demotic Egyptian, and ancient Greek. Paik’s version of the Rosetta Stone carries drawings of videos on the top, the artist’s artistic career in various languages in the middle, and images excerpted from his video work at the bottom. His career, profiled in the middle part, explains how his interest moved from music to video art, how he started to participate in the Fluxus art movement, his relationships with other artists who exchanged inspiration with one another in Korean, English, French, German, and Japanese, providing a short, clear summary of the developmental stages and directions of Paik’s artistic pursuit.

1975/1997, 24 TVs, 24 fish tanks, live fish, 3-channel video, color, silent

Twenty-four televisions are placed behind 24 fish tanks standing in a row. Live fishes are swimming inside the tanks while a dancing Merce Cunningham, fish swimming in the sea, and a flying airplane are shown on the TV monitors. Through the superimposition of the fish tanks and the monitors, live fish and the ones in the video come into the same spatiotemporal realm; Cunningham dances with the fish; the fish swim in the sky; and the airplane flies in the sea. The viewer, in the visual mechanism where the fish tanks become the monitors and vice versa, are invited to look at the TV monitors from a new perspective and perceive the television monitor as a frame that cuts out what is to be shown from the surroundings. Dealing with the relationship between realities and representations with the frame of the television in the middle. Paik often incorporated natural elements into his works. He stressed the coexistence and correspondence between technology and nature, rather than emphasize the differences between them, contrasting the “liveliness” of TV images and “aliveness” of real nature.