Nam June Paik, the Future in a Monitor

Twenty years after Nam June Paik’s death, his old monitors seem less a thing of the past than one might expect. At Tokyo’s Watari-um, the exhibition brings one of the pioneers of Media Art back into focus through works created between the 1960s and the 1990s, when television, video and electronic circuits were still largely uncharted territory. Paik’s relationship with the museum goes back a long way. In 1978, he exhibited at Galerie Watari, the forerunner of today’s institution, beginning a collaboration that would continue for decades. Some of the works on display grew directly out of this relationship with Tokyo and with the museum spaces designed by Mario Botta. Among them is Time in Triangular from 1993, built with 72 monitors and neon tubes, alongside New Candle, from the same year, in which the flame of a candle is filmed and multiplied through a system of cameras and projections. In Forest of Cage / Revelation of the Forest, also from 1993, 23 screens coexist with real vegetation, bringing nature and electronics into the same environment without reducing one to a simple counterpoint to the other. This ability to treat technology as a material rather than simply a tool runs throughout the exhibition. From early video experiments such as Hand and Face, from 1961, to the large-scale installations of the 1990s, televisions, images, light and objects trace more than three decades of Paik’s work and, with it, a crucial chapter in the history of Media Art.