Nam June Paik Art Center

Character

In 2002, the future Nam June Paik Art Center acquired dozens of works, thousands of video-archive items and the contents of Paik’s Broome Street studio in New York. The studio objects now form a reconstructed Memorabilia display on the museum’s second floor

Paik was still alive when Gyeonggi Province began planning the center with him. He wrote a phrase on the site plan that the museum still uses as its institutional idea: a place “where Nam June Paik lives on.” That has led the center to treat preservation, archives and new media-art experiments as parts of the same job

TV Garden places monitors among living plants on the first floor; Magnet TV, TV Crown and other works sit alongside documentation, recordings and objects that show how Paik moved between television, music, performance and electronics

The experience

Screens lie among real foliage at low angles, playing Global Groove so that several images can be watched at once through the plants

Upstairs, Memorabilia reconstructs material from Paik’s New York studio rather than presenting a polished artist’s room. The archive extends into correspondence, drawings, photographs, performance records and thousands of analog videos, including footage and single-channel works

Architects Kirsten Schemel and Marina Stankovic used reflective and partly printed glass in a screen-like facade, while the interior separates two main galleries from the archive, library and smaller research spaces. Temporary exhibitions can therefore move beyond Paik without displacing the permanent works and study material tied to him

History

Gyeonggi Province and Nam June Paik signed an agreement to create the museum in 2001. The following year, the project committee purchased 67 artworks, 2,285 video-archive items and the contents of Paik’s Broome Street studio, establishing the collection before the building existed

An international design competition followed in 2003. Kirsten Schemel and Marina Stankovic were selected from 430 entries, and construction began in 2006, the year Paik died. The 5,600-square-metre building was completed in April 2008

The public opening came on 8 October 2008 with Now Jump, a festival involving more than 100 artists and groups from 19 countries

After opening, the center established the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize, launched publications and symposiums, and opened the Nam June Paik Library in 2011. Its collection now includes Paik, artists from his circle and later media artists working with related experimental questions

Before you go

The museum is compact enough to pair with the neighboring Gyeonggi Provincial Museum or Gyeonggi Children’s Museum. Paik’s permanent works reward time before the rotating galleries, especially if TV Garden and the reconstructed studio are the main reason for the visit