57STUDIO
Nam June Paik, Wrap Around the World, 1988, still image, Nam June Paik Art Center Video Archive.
To commemorate Paik’s 90th anniversary, a five-episode video series titled Wrap Around the World was curated by Nam June Paik Art Center, filmed by 57 Studio, and presented by Korea Foundation. Inspired by Paik’s 1988 live broadcast of the same title, the last one of his trilogy of satellite opera, this series took Paik’s Video Study, the online video archive of Nam June Paik Art Center, as a research platform, and contemporary artists of today created a new work drawing on his video aesthetics and messages of peace and goodwill to humanity.
Paik’s Wrap Around the World was on air on September 11, 1988, one week before the Seoul Olympic Games. Like his previous satellite broadcasts Good Morning Mr. Orwell and Bye Bye Kipling, pop singers and avant-garde artists mingled together for this show. As the Cold War was coming to an end, eleven broadcasting stations across the globe, including those from Russia and China, took part in this project. It included Kung Fu and circus from China, a salsa carnival from Brazil, a motor race from Ireland, a Brahms concert at the composer’s house, and so forth. In Korea, Samulnori, a percussion quartet, was performed in front of Paik’s The More The Better installed in the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. Paik himself also turned up, wearing dopo and gat, a gentlemen’s robe and hat, and staging an ancestral rite, all in traditional forms.
The newly commissioned series is composed of five videos, “Wrap Around the World,” “Seoul Sonata,” “Zen for the Loner,” “VR Garden,” and “Letters from the East,” for which LEENALCHI, DJ Lee Jinwook, sound artist Jeong Jinhwa, Park Sohee of ELLETRAVAILLE, and Park Minhee of HAEPAARY joined.
1. Wrap Around The World (with LEENALCHI)
2. Seoul Sonata (with DJ Lee Jinwook)
3. Zen for the Loner (with Jeong JinHwa)
4. VR Garden (with ELLETRAVAILLE Park Sohee, Jeong JinHwa)
5. Letters from the East (with HAEPAARY Park Minhee)
-
NJP x KF 5. Letters from the East (with HAEPAARY Park Minhee)
One of Paik’s drawing is turned into gagok, a form of Korea’s traditional music and national intangible cultural heritage, through the song performed by Park Minhee of HAEPAARY, who is also a certified trainee of the genre. This episode presents Paik’s playful drawing Untitled (2021) where he wrote nine fourcharacter idioms in different colorsfrom a Chinese poem Thousand Character Classic, including 律呂調陽, meaning six bright sounds and six dark sounds are brought to balance yin and yang. Following his interview clip about the world as a beautiful place, these idioms unfolded against the backdrop of mystical natural landscape come to have a powerful resonance.
-
NJP x KF 4. VR Garden (with ELLETRAVAILLE Park Sohee, Jeong Jinhwa)
In Paik’s TV Garden (1974/2002), a permanent display of Nam June Paik Art Center, the natural environment and the television technology coalesce into a single organism inhabiting the common space. Viewers are left with the overriding holistic impression, and invited to see various plants and many monitors at once. Drawn from this and also from today’s OSV, “oddly satisfying videos” of which contents are repetitive actions that viewers find relaxing and pleasing, ‘VR Garden’ was created by Botanical designer Park Sohee of ELLETRAVAILLE.
-
NJP x KF 3. Zen for the Loner (with Jeong Jinhwa)
In “Nam June Paik – Das gute Gewissen der Avantgarde” (1977), a German television WDR’s documentary, there is a scene of his performance Zen for Walking where Paik ties a string to a violin and pulls it around. This episode intends to recreate Paik’s pioneering journey of art through a shoe suspended from a drone, imagined as his reincarnation, passing alone through a vast expanse of nature. The music is the work of sound artist Jeong Jinhwa.
-
NJP x KF 2. Seoul Sonata (with DJ Lee Jinwook)
In 1975 Paik did a contemporary DJ-like performance with several turntables, called Fluxus Sonata No. 4. In the Anthology Film Archive ofNew York. ‘Seoul Sonata’ takes the form of a musical playlist, which can be easily found in such online video sharing platforms as YouTube. enabling viewers to enjoy Paik’sarchival videoswhile listening to thetunes selected byDJ Jinwook, from the experimental synthwave music of the 1980s, the very period of Paik’s satellite art.
-
NJP x KF 1. Wrap Around The World (with LEENALCHI)
In Paik’s original broadcast in 1988, comedian Al Franken from Saturday Night Live and actor Tom Davis in the role of Dr. Mobius appear in an alien spacecraft-like broadcasting studio, and have a conversation about our virulent nationalism, ceaseless brutality, wanton disregard for the earth. These figures then connect beyond space and time with the pansori pop band LEENALCHI in Seoul in 2022. Archival clips from Paik’s Guadalcanal Requiem (1977) is followed by LEENALCHI’s “Yeobonari” performance, breaking down the boundaries between east and west, between classics and pops and singing for the unity and harmony of mankind.
Related
-
-
-
PAIK’S VIDEO STUDY
-
Project
NJP x KF Wrap Around the World