Nam June Paik, Rocketship to Virtual Venus, 1991. Collection of Taikang Insurance Group.
The exhibition Stars, Trigrams explores how the stars, planets, satellites, televisions, videos, numbers, and written characters that appear in Nam June Paik’s works come together to form a world of their own. “Stars” open up a shared scale that people from different backgrounds can look toward together, while “Trigrams” function as a system of signs through which a changing world can be understood in terms of time, direction, movement, and their interrelations.
Centered on Venus(1990), Sirius(1990), and Rocketship to Virtual Venus(1991), the exhibition examines how ancient perceptions of the heavens and modern electronic signals, as well as Eastern thought and Western technology, meet and are transformed within Paik’s work. Rather than presenting images that merely represent the universe, Stars, Trigrams proposes “Nam June Paik’s Planet”—a world in which different media and signs create new relationships and are continually re-formed through the viewer’s perception.
Stars, Trigrams