Nam June Paik Exhibition at the Asia Society - Rose Chang-Crespo

              Nam June Paik, the founder of video art, united television and video technology with the body. He was one of the pioneers of the video movement who was fascinated with the manipulation of video imagery. His fascination began in 1965 when he purchased one of the first Sony Portapak video recorders, and he was interested in all aspects of video technology and even went ad fat as developing a video synthesizer. The Asia Society has a large exhibition dedicated to Paik’s work - including sixty of most well-known pieces including the “Golden Buddha” and the “family of robot”. The family of robots really caught my eye because they were larger than life and made of TV monitors and displays. The sign read that there were 9 unique sculptures which were created in 1986 and featured in The Art Institute of Chicago, but I only saw three from this collection of “family members”. There was the baby who was made of thirteen Samsung aluminum, color, silent Television monitors. The images and videos playing on these monitors were the clearest out of the three family members - images of children and babies living in poverty from different parts of the world flashed quickly. It was almost “glitch art” because there were images of small children living in poverty and then a globe would flash which would then turn into a heart and then an eye. It was a play on the eyes because while I tried to focus and see what was going on, another image would populate and I would lose track of what I was seeing.


           What really caught my eye from the three was the Father figure, he was the largest of them all and seemed the oldest and most worn out. While the baby’s monitors flashed images of famished children and poverty, the father’s eleven monitors seemed to be more of a flashing psychedelic pattern. It was hard to make out the images behind the patterns and what seemed to be planets. I spotted an RCR, Sentinel, and Motorola monitor which made up his body. These were vintage TV’s, radio casings and monitors. The mother was also made up of vintage TV & radio casings which were colored and silent. Her torso was different from the baby and the fathers, she looked slimmer and actually had a waist. Her torso was made up of a strange casing which held three small screens/monitors that was playing the NY1 news - and it was a live broadcast. I stood there and waited to see if they were stills from older news segments because the news all seemed to revolve around marijuana and illegal drug findings in NY, but then I realized the time and weather were accurate and then the news anchors came on - so the smaller TVs were tuned live. Paik is suggesting that technology is a product of human innovation and can be the reason of our withdrawal from reality — by adding human qualities to technology he is representing technology as a “means of resistance.” He felt it was the artist’s duty to reimagine technology in the service of art and culture.