Nam June Paik Art Center will present the 8th Nam June Paik Prize Exhibition, Joan Jonas: The More-than-Human World, from November 20, 2025 - March 29, 2026. This exhibition marks the first solo exhibition of Joan Jonas (b. 1936, New York, NY) in Korea. For more than six decades, since the 1960s, Jonas has pioneered her own artistic language across media such as video, performance, and drawing, establishing herself as one of the most influential artists of our time. Her experimental oeuvre, spanning performance, video, conceptual art, and theater, has profoundly shaped the hybridization and expansion of contemporary art.

The exhibition traces her entire artistic trajectory, beginning with early representative works such as Wind (1968), which explores the interaction between nature and the human body, and continuing to her recent installation Empty Rooms (2025), a synthesis of sculpture, video, and drawing that visualizes absence and loss. Structured in three parts, the exhibition is organized thematically rather than chronologically. The first section highlights Jonas’ role as a pioneer of performance and video art, presenting works she developed in the 1960s and 1970s within the artistic communities in New York. The second section focuses on her experiments from the 1980s onward, when she moved beyond anthropocentric narratives to construct new ecological stories grounded in myth and literature. The third section introduces her most recent works, emphasizing how recurring visual motifs from the early 1960s to today have been transformed and expanded, reflecting her view on contemporary issues.

This solo exhibition of Joan Jonas, the 8th Nam June Paik Prize Exhibition, reaffirms the award’s spirit of honoring artists who promoted understanding and contributed to world peace through their tireless artistic practice. Her work resonates with pressing global themes—the environment, climate crisis, ecology, and the interrelationship of existence—inviting audiences to reflect on “the more-than-human world.”