Nam June Paik is often considered the first video artist, and his impact on the medium is inestimable. Paik was born in Seoul in 1932 and later studied music theory in Tokyo and Munich before making New York his permanent home. There, he became entrenched in the city’s incipient Fluxus scene and developed a reputation for his pyramids and piles of blinking televisions. These included 1971’s TV Cello, made with classical cellist Charlotte Moorman—in which TVs stacked to form the shape of the aforementioned instrument show images of Moorman playing—and other similarly pioneering works that utilize video, music, and performance to thoroughly avant-garde ends. This month, the eagerly awaited Nam June Paik Art Center opens in Yongin, just south of Seoul, where it will feature permanent installations of more than 200 of the artist’s pieces, as well as exhibitions of new works by international artists. Tobias Berger, previously the executive director at Para/Site Art Space, in Hong Kong, has been appointed chief curator at the new institution; his first show will go on view in February of next year. The long, low museum—which was designed by architects Kirsten Schemel and Marina Stankovic to harmoniously merge with the landscape where it is situated—has a screen facade consisting of several layers of printed glass with varying degrees of reflection. Its transparency should allow the many glowing screens it shelters to be partly visible from outside, a nice nod to Paik’s own formal concerns and make the building glow like so many lanterns in the night.

The Nam June Paik Art Center opens on October 9, 2008 in Seoul, South Korea. 

"Nam June Paik Art Center" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.