March 1, 2008
Source: Korea.net

The construction of an art center dedicated to the late video artist Paik Nam-june has been completed, the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation said in late February.

Paik, who died in January 2006 of natural causes at age 74, stunned the world in 1963 when he exhibited a dozen television sets randomly scattered about as their screen images were deliberately distorted with magnets.

The art center in Yongin, south of Seoul, is expected to work as a research and discussion venue for domestic and international video artists, the foundation said.

The center was designed by a German Architect Kirsten Shemel and has a special display room, archives, training room, research lab and convenience facilities in the building with two stories below ground and three above.

The center will open around October after the installation of Paik’s 2,000 artworks and interior decoration, the foundation said.

A memorandum of understanding between the late Paik and Gyeonggi-do (Province) in 2001 gave birth to the art center. The foundation official expressed hope that the center will compile Paik’s achievements and further become a place for discussion and training for artists at home and abroad.

Born in Seoul in 1932 and trained as a composer and pianist in childhood, Paik sought to expand his artistic expressions by removing walls between different genres, naturally joining the Fluxus movement in the 1960s.

The avant-garde movement challenged existing notions of art by inviting unconventional objects and untested ideas into artistic bids to depict the rapidly changing modern world.

Paik gained worldwide fame as he pursued his career as the first and most successful video artist in the world, generating an enthusiastic collection of works such as “Good Morning, Mr. Orwell,” “TV-Buddha,” and “Zen for Film.”

In many of his works, Paik manipulated traditional video images by overlaying other images and showing dancers in the form of a white line freely moving against the backdrop of brilliant color and text.

Despite being partially paralyzed and wheelchair-bound after suffering a stroke in 1996, he continued to pursue his active career as an artist by participating in various events such as the German Video Sculpture exhibition (1997), Art Basel (1997), Seoul Engraving Festival (1998) and a Retrospective Exhibition at Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California (2000).