October 30, 2018

Sang Ae Park

Nam June Paik Art Center

Paik-Abe Correspondence comprises correspondence between Nam June Paik and his technical colleague, Shuya Abe. Abe donated correspondences to Nam June Paik Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, and Smithsonian American Art Museum Nam June Paik Archive. Correspondence written in Japanese held by three institutions are collected and translated in Korean as well as English. The publication includes original manuscripts in Japanese as high-resolution images.
Paik-Abe Correspondence covers years from 1963 to 2005. 97 units of correspondence tells how Paik developed artistic ideas for his early works, how Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer was fabricated, how Paik’s techno-artistic ideas were realized with Abe’s contribution, and among others. Other than their artistic journey, their life-long friendship can be traced from letters and postcards.
It is a meaningful research process to publish correspondence with devotional help of Shuya Abe. Surprisingly remembering every detail of important events, Mr. Abe reviewed and confirmed questionable issues in the translating and editing process. As well noticed from original manuscripts of Paik, even Mr. Abe sometimes had hard time in recognizing Paik’s handwriting. With full support from Mr. Abe, a good friend of Paik from childhood and academic professionals in Media Art and translated and proofread original manuscripts.
Nam June Paik Art Center would hope that Paik-Abe Correspondence could be valuable historic records in exploring both Nam June Paik’s artworks and early Media Art.

Introduction…………………………Jinsuk Suh (Director, Nam June Paik Art Center)
Prologue………………………………Shuya Abe
Authors……………………………… Nam June Paik, Shuya Abe
Index
Correspondence
Translator’s note…………………Kyunghee Lee
Technical Terms
Colophon

(ISBN: 978-89-97128-42-6, 417 pages, KRW25,000)

Purchase/Gift request (library@njpartcenter.kr)