Nam June Paik, Untitled, 1998, oil stick on paper, 38.1 × 50.8 cm
The Nam June Paik Art Center presents Waiting for U.F.O., inaugurating the Nam June Paik Media Art Festival on the 20th anniversary of the artist’s passing in 2026. As its first project, Cosmic Color Opera reinterprets his cosmic thinking through children’s sensibilities and perspectives.
For Nam June Paik, a planet is an open world where different beings exchange signals and connect with one another. The exhibition explore this world through the visual language of saekdong. This pattern, where different colors are arranged side by side in continuous succession, is a metaphor for a world where difference and diversity coexist. Here, the dong in saekdong is newly read as dong (童, child), guiding visitors to experience the cosmos through children’s sensibilities.
The exhibition unfolds in three chapters based on the Nam June Paik Art Center’s collection and contemporary artworks, demonstrating how Paik’s philosophy is expanded within today’s sensibilities. In the first, visitors drift as if floating between worlds, experiencing it through their senses. In the following scene, drawings by children from Korea and Uganda resonate within a single frame, revealing moments when their senses connect. In the final scene, visitors move and respond, and their gestures expand into a single cosmic rhythm. These scenes reveal a constantly evolving universe in which different beings form relationships, exchange sensory experiences, and remain in continuous becoming. Each of us is a color and a sound, and part of the whole, continuing Nam June Paik’s world.
Cosmic Color Opera