Korean artist Nam June Paik, who died in 2006 at the age of 73, may not be a household name in this country but his prescient approach to future life on Planet Earth is about to be celebrated in a major new exhibition.
No other artist ever predicted quite so accurately the impact video and television would have on the art world. Paik even saw the ways in which technology could open up everyday life by coining the phrase "electronic superhighway", pre-dating the all-encompassing "information superhighway".
Organised in conjunction with the Nam June Paik Art Center in South Korea, Transmitted Live: Nam June Paik Resounds opens on Friday at the Talbot Rice Gallery as part of the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF), tying in with this year's theme: the interaction of art and technology. According to EIF director Jonathan Mills, "The multimedia works of the subversive spirit of Nam June Paik simultaneously create a critique of consumerism and an eloquent elegy for an electronic era."
Often referred to as the founding father of video art, Paik had more layers to his work than there are wires in an old TV set. Artist, musician, inventor, innovator, writer, teacher and prolific collaborator (Joseph Beuys, Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage were just three names he worked with), Paik's impact and legacy continue to resonate.
It is unusual for the Talbot Rice to mount a major exhibition posthumously, but as principal curator Pat Fisher states, such is the importance of Paik's work it was felt the Edinburgh University gallery was the perfect setting.
"Nam June Paik is not so well known in UK, but hopefully this exhibition will help change that," Fisher says. "This is the first exhibition of his work in Scotland, and it is fitting that it is at Edinburgh University, the university attended by James Clerk Maxwell, who went on to develop his theory of electromagnetism. Appropriately, Scotland is also the country which produced John Logie Baird, who invented the television."
This show also celebrates the 50th anniversary of Paik's first solo exhibition in 1963, an art-historical revolution from which the media art of the last 50 years took its lead. Transmitted Live focuses on Paik's experimental approach to his art. Selected video sculptures, video films and documentary photographs from the collections of the Nam June Paik Art Center show how the "ancient future" imagined by the artist has become a reality.
Paik was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1932. His family fled to Hong Kong in 1950, and later to Japan, after the onset of the Korean War. The young Nam June was a classically trained pianist who went on to study history of art and music at the University of Tokyo.
Paik travelled extensively, his art shaped by living in Korea, Japan, Germany and the US. Living in Germany in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he met John Cage and developed his experimental music performances as part of the radical Fluxus movement.
Fluxus's works occurred outside the gallery or museum setting. Paik used instruments as an extension of his body: dragging a violin behind him down the street, smashing his face against the keys of a piano or literally destroying them, revelling in the shock of such unorthodox acts, and the sounds they generated.
Paik's experimental music formed a major part of his first solo show at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany, in 1963, an exhibition recognised as being the first to introduce the television set into a fine art context.
For this show, the main floor of Talbot Rice contains a survey of Paik's works in film, sculpture and documentary. Schubert and Beethoven, two of his handmade robots (looking like early versions of Wall-E), sit alongside his Video Synthesizer, TV Cello and a video lounge. Paik's collaborative work is also highlighted.
The upper gallery is filled with material from the 1963 exhibition and his broader career, while in the Round Room, Paik's TV Buddha sits alone, gazing at his own technologically generated image.
Just as our best writers take a leap of faith and peer into future worlds, so a great artist like Paik - even after his death - can still stretch boundaries. "In this exhibition," adds Fisher, "we are trying to invoke the spirit of the man; mischievous, playful and intellectual."
Transmitted Live: Nam June Paik Resounds, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (0131 650 2210, www.trg. ed.ac.uk), Aug 9-Oct 19. The opening weekend features a series of performances illustrating Paik's legacy and influence; for details and booking visit www.eif.co.uk/paik
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