Wrap around the World is a project Nam June Paik completed for the 1988 Seoul Olympics. He tried to symbolize the end of the Cold War era by connecting all the regions and cultures around the world using the satellite system. Many countries including China and Russia across the East and West participated in this project, and the boundaries between genre and cultural hierarchies were dissolved. Most importantly, the project presented one, unified Earth beyond the limitations of physical distance by consolidating the physical realm of regional cultures using the satellite system.

Nam June Paik Art Center’s Wrap around the Time builds on Wrap around the World, as a special exhibition planned for the 10th anniversary since Paik’s passing. The project attempts to go a step further from consolidating physical spaces, and dissolve/connect the temporal gaps between the past, present, and future. Such space-time compressions will take place through Paik, as well as the collaboration of contemporary artists.

Nam June Paik Art Center selected contemporary media artists who will produce and prove various discourses across the past and the present by researching Paik’s works, building a research center comprising humanists, scientists, and aestheticians around the world. The exhibition will present their work side by side(in relation to?) with Paik’s works that serve as original inspirations. Though this process, we will be reminded of the fact that Paik’s art world stands firm at the foundation of various contemporary cultural phenomena and discourses.

Through Wrap around the time, various studies will be conducted about Paik, and new discourses will be generated. Also, Paik and contemporary artists will become one across the spatial and temporal gap between the 20th and the 21st centuries. Our focus is not only on re-illuminating Paik’s art, but also focusing on and verifying the infinite expandability of Paik’s artistic world.

• Curatorial Statement/Jinsuk Suh: Wrap around the Time
• Gregor Jansen: Multimedia Crossover Gunfire
  – Isabella Fürnkäs
  – Raphaela Vogel
• Dae-Shik Kim: Mind Body Problem
  – Vakki
• Mizuki Takahashi: Where has emotion gone?
  – Daisuke Yamashiro
• Mark B. N. Hansen: The Cosmic Envelope
  – David Haines & Joyce Hinterding
  – Joyce Hinterding
• Jinsuk Suh: Bio Art—The Fusion of Humans and Machines
  – Jungki Beak
• Hyun-Suk Seo: For What Did the Musical Instruments Have to Get Destroyed?—The Dilemma of Avant-Garde, or the Ordeals of Musical Instruments
  – UJINO
• Jaewon Yu: Interpenetration
  – Biho Ryu
• Young-june Lee: Interfere with TVs by Applying a Blob of Metal — Thoughts on Nam June Paik’s Magnet TV
  – Sora Kim
• Zhang Ga: Sounds, Images, Perception and Electrons
  – Zhang Peili
  – Wang Yuyang
  – Carsten Nicolai
• Yujoo Han: The Intersection of Perspectival/Parallax View
  – A.Typist
• Sungmin Hong: Nam June Paik’s Taboos and Transgressions
  – Bubble Deck Auto Wash Charlotte Norm
• Artists’ CV
• Works List