2009

Jungjin Park, Hunyee Jung, Susanne Neuburger, David Zerbib, Chunsil Yoon, Jeonghwan Jo, Hank Bull, Kogawa Tetsuo, Chulki Hong, Joonggwon Jin

Nam June Paik Art Center

Nam June Paik, Perfect Crime and the Construction of the Tele-topia Empire
Youngchul Lee and Namsoo Kim

Youngchul Lee is Director of Nam June Paik Art Center and artistic director of its inaugural festival Now Jump. He was artistic director of 1997 Gwangju Biennial, and 2005 Anyang Public Art Project, as well as Professor at the Kaywon School of Art and Design.

Namsoo Kim is a performing arts and dance critic. Currently he is at the Nam June Paik Art Center and is also on the editorial board of the performing arts magazine titled Pan. Kim’s field of research centers on the interdisciplinary development of theatre, dance, media and installation.

“The Gift of Nam June Paik 2” is an anthology based on the presentations for the two-day seminar held at Nam June Paik Art Center in September 2009. The seminar was intended to approach the notion of “hybridity” that lies at the heart of Paik’s thoughts and art practices from a number of different disciplines—philosophy, modern physics, anthropology, history, media studies, curating, and art history, all of which were brought together in order to shape an assemblage of his worlds. The effort to reread Paik in the course of interweaving the threads different in nature is to lend ourselves to the belief that it will lead us to—borrowing Gilles Deleueze and Féelix Guattari’s term—a qualitative multiplicity.

Paik invited human beings, who had suffered from the threat of entropy discovered by the second principle of thermodynamics in the nineteenth century, to the art by which they would open their mind to chaos. For it does not occur to us, as Ludwig Wittgenstein states, that the path of the future “is not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing direction.” It was in the uncontrollable chaos that Paik found his artistic point of departure as he discovered an unsolved problem left by Karl Otto Goetz, who had wrestled with the uncontrollable machine in the late 1950s. For sure, Paik’s own new problem was not the chaos itself, but a new territory wherein a reorganized, constructed chaos would be contained. As a private thinker, he constructed the Tele-topia Empire, dissolving all distinctions—between the Western and the non-Western, subject and object, the nature and the artificial…

· Anthropology of Art for Nam June Paik Cosmology : Paik as a Spaceman
Park is an anthropologist and professor of Cultural Anthropology at Hanyang University. Park has written several books in the fields of humanities, literature, and religion. Most recently he published the books and .

· Nam June Paik and Marcel Duchamp
Hunyee Jung is a professor and art historian at Hansung University. Her field of research includes Nam June Paik and various modes of artistic practice. Jung’s writings include Zen Time in Nam June Paik’s Works, Pornography and Metaphysics and The realm of the imaginary in Art History.

· “A Great Man, and a Wonderful Teacher” – Peter Brötzmann in conversation with susanne Neuburger
Susanne Neuburger is senior curator at the museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK). Since joining the museum in 1983, she has organized several large-scale survey exhibitions, including (2003), (2004), (2005), (2006) and (2008). In 2009 she organized , a recreation of Paik’s famous from which MUMOK holds the largest collection of works.

· Paik and the Humanization of Technology : the Other Logos of Tekhnè
David Zerbib teaches Aesthetics and philosophy of Art at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne and at the École Supérieure d’ Art d’ Annecy.

He conducts research on the notion of performance and collaborates in different publications on art and aesthetics. He also collaborated in the unpublished DVD-ROM project developed about and with Nam June Paik as part of the Anarchive collection. Most recently, Zerbib published “Nam June Paik, Madness in the age of random access” in Artpress 2, n° 12, February-April, 2009.

· Nam June Paik’s Art from the Perspective of Modern Physics
Experimental physicist, High-energy physics lab in Gyeongsang University, U.S. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

· Revolution in the Age of the Empire : Multitude and Nam June Paik’s Practice of Art
Jo studied proletarian literature in the age of Japanese colonization at Seoul National University where he also obtained his PhD in Literature. Currently, Jo lectures on Marxist theory, post-modern social theory and cultural theory. Jo is the author of , and <21st Century Spartacus>. Jo is the editor of the Autonomy Review and has also translated several of Antonio Negri’s books into Korean.

· multi-inter-trans
Bull studied with Robert Markle and Nobuo Kubota at the New School of Art. In 1973 he moved to Vancouver to join the Western front, one of Canada’s first artist-run centres, where his practice expanded to include performance, video, radio and telecommunications art. In 1999, he was a co-founder of the Vancouver international Centre for Contemporary Asian Art(Centre A), where he continues in the role of executive director.

· Nam June Paik and the Politics of Symmetry
Hong is a Political Science PhD candidate at Seoul National University. Recentrly, Hong translated Bruno Latour’s book, into Korean. Hong is also a noise and improvisation musician as well as a sound artist.

· Reconfiguration of Nam June Paik’s Aesthetics
Jin obtained his master’s degree in Aesthetics at Seoul National University and then studied Structuralist Language Theory at the Freie Universität in Berlin. Jin is the author of , , . , and .

(296pages, ISBN 978-89-962263-5-2)