On Collecting Time

Nine artists/Teams are here, ranging in a wide temporal spectrum. On Collecting Time, the new acquisitions exhibition presents their 11 works collected by Nam June Paik Art Center from 2020 to 2021, an unprecedented era of long-term closure of art museums. In a ‘strange time’ when we were forbidden to meet face-to-face, the doors of the museum, making exhibitions and providing education, were also closed. During that time, Nam June Paik Art Center began collecting contemporary media art while waiting for the day to meet the audience again. The works collected then are shown in this exhibition. Covering different themes and artists that cannot be grouped into a single keyword, the works contain various questions and indications of the strange time.
On Collecting Time affirms that Nam June Paik Art Center is carrying out a mission to collect and research into the works of contemporary media artists as well as Paik’s. In addition, expanding the horizons of Paik’s work, which combined ‘temporal art’ with the existing category of ‘spatial art,’ it initiates discussion and generates controversy, ‘to collect’ works of art that ‘cut through the waist’ of time. These new acquisitions deal with ‘human time and machine time’ in various forms, such as video, installation, drawing, performance, robots, and A.I. They reflect on a specific historical time and reveal the poetic beauty of non-deterministic and accidental time.
This exhibition raises interesting questions about collecting time. Let’s imagine that the time-based works are not to be completed yet and are going through the process of transformation and growth as organisms. You will look at something before and after these works, think about the possibility of change in their time, and will be led to discussions through performances, conversations, and forums. The exhibition is anything but a display of works; it will be an experiment on retracing and overtaking the time of the works.