Walk about Water is a commissioned work by the Nam June Paik Art Center, which combines performance and sound installation. Tetsuya Umeda presents a performance that invites the audience to explore the space of the Nam June Paik Art Center. The artist displays his work in hidden spaces within the museum instead of the exhibition space, and the audience experiences anew the space while they find the artwork. The museum’s iconic collections, such as TV Garden, TV Fish, and the archive of Paik’s New York studio, Memorabilia, reveal new aspects under the artist’s direction. The backstage of Nam June Paik Art Center, open to the public for the first time, will offer an opportunity for the audience to discover the architectural charm as well as the new role of the museum.

The 50-minute touring performance of Walk about Water that explores the artist’s installation and the museum takes place every Friday and Saturday for four weeks starting from September 13. Tours will be held six times daily, beginning at 2:00 PM, with 20-minute intervals between each tour. The interaction of layers of spaces between the glass walls of the exhibition space, the audience members, who begin at different times, move around the museum, intersecting and drawing new paths across various parts. The space of Nam June Paik Art Center, as we knew it, will be reinterpreted from a different perspective, offering a new experience that connects with a poetic landscape of light and sound.

Tetsuya Umeda

Tetsuya Umeda’s work exists beyond genres and formats, traversing music, installation, sound, theater, performance, and sometimes chorale. Since college, Umeda began to build a reputation for improvised sound performances and installations in Osaka and continues to be a regular performer at avant-garde music festivals abroad. In addition, his site-specific sound installations and performances have been staged in galleries, museums, theatres, and biennials, earning him an international reputation in various fields, as has his work that, again, defies categorization into typical artistic genres.

Umeda says “It is my nature to listen to space, to place things in space, and to hear the materials of things” and has been presenting site-specific sound performances by placing everyday objects in space, making them move, and intervening with the sounds and rhythms. His work has expanded beyond closed spaces to include installations in empty houses in redevelopment areas, choirs with children in remote places, urban sounds encountered as boats cross rivers, and performances that invite audiences into and engage them in the hidden and undisclosed spaces of museums and theaters. In Umeda’s work, the performer and audience are not easily distinguishable, and sometimes the relationship is reversed. He envisions his work as “a flat playing ground with no boundaries between people and objects or between the work and the viewer” in which the relationships between objects exist on their own, moving as small individuals.