David Bowie
Date/ 1996
Artist(Credit Line)/ Nam June Paik
Classification/ Painting
Dimensions / 93.9×119.4cm
Elements of popular culture frequently appear in Nam June Paik’s works and texts. In his trilogy of satellite opera, pop artists like singers and those from the art world were brought to intermingle without division and hierarchy. One of them is David Bowie, who was featured in Paik’s 1998 satellite project Wrap Around the World. Bowie performed Look Back in Anger with contemporary dance group La La La Human Steps, to which Paik applied his video synthesis in real time for live broadcast. From 1994, Paik also produced a few Bowie-themed canvas works, and in this painting, he combined a still image of Bowie from the video, with something of a pixel color chart so that the whole painting looks like a digital image.
Elements of popular culture frequently appear in Nam June Paik’s works and texts. In his trilogy of satellite opera, pop artists like singers and those from the art world were brought to intermingle without division and hierarchy. One of them is David Bowie, who was featured in Paik’s 1998 satellite project Wrap Around the World. Bowie performed Look Back in Anger with contemporary dance group La La La Human Steps, to which Paik applied his video synthesis in real time for live broadcast. From 1994, Paik also produced a few Bowie-themed canvas works, and in this painting, he combined a still image of Bowie from the video, with something of a pixel color chart so that the whole painting looks like a digital image.
