| Exhibition | Datumsoria |
|---|---|
| Period | 2018-07-12 ~ 2019-09-16 |
| Venue | Nam June Paik Art Center 2f. |
| Planning | |
| The exhibition aims, through resuscitating the valuable legacy of experiments in art and technology from the mid-twentieth century, to meet with the challenges of a technologically constructed time-space: a new reality that has altogether changed the rules of the game in work and play, in politics and economics, and in artistic imagination and cultural sensibility. | |
| Summary | |
| • Nam June Paik Born in Seoul in 1932, Paik spent his middleschool days in Seoul. His incessant exploration about music and the body was also a key factor in constructing a distinct territory of his art. From the 1980s Paik realized a series of global projects, such as Good Morning Mr. Orwell, to tear down barriers between avantgarde art and popular culture by satellite TV technology. He won the Golden Lion of the 1993 Venice Biennale for his work on the theme of artist as nomad in the German Pavilion. Later on he expanded his technological realm into other media like laser, and while suffering a stroke since the mid-1990s, he never ceased to take his artistic step forward until he passed away in Miami in 2006. Paik is a pioneering media artist working with various technologies in creative and experimental ways. He saw the artist’s role as consisting in thinking about the future and sought for better ways of global communication through art. Regarded as “one of the forerunners of a new breed of artists who are scientists, philosophers and engineers at the same time” and as “a very special and genuine genius and futurologist with foresight” Paik still lives on with us right here as “the most contemporary artist” today. • Liu Xiaodong, born in 1963 in China, is a painter of modern life, whose large-scale works serve as a kind of history painting for the emerging world. Liu locates the human dimension to such global issues as population displacement, environmental crisis and economic upheaval, but through carefully orchestrated compositions, he walks the line between artifice and reality. A leading figure among the Chinese Neo-Realist painters to emerge in the 1990s, his adherence to figurative painting amounts to a conceptual stance within a contemporary art context where photographic media dominate. His undertaking ‘to see people as they really are’ was galvanised in the aftermath of 1989 events and, alert to the legacy of Chinese Socialist Realism, his compositions are painted with loose, casual brushstrokes and layered with meaning. While he works from life and often en plein air, he chooses sitters to supply ancillary narratives to landscapes or situations. This participatory dimension to his practice, where projects are also documented by diaries and films, reflects an urgent sense of interconnection: ‘Society and art’, he says, ‘should be like breathing – one breathes in and the other breathes out’ (2008). • Carsten Nicolai, born 1965 in Karl-Marx-Stadt, is a German artist and musician based in Berlin. He is part of an artist generation who works intensively in the transitional area between music, art and science. In his work he seeks to overcome the separation of the sensory perceptions of man by making scientific phenomenons like sound and light frequencies perceivable for both eyes and ears. Influenced by scientific reference systems, Nicolai often engages mathematic patterns such as grids and codes, as well as error, random and self-organizing structures. His installations have a minimalistic aesthetic that by its elegance and consistency is highly intriguing. After his participation in important international exhibitions like documenta X and the 49th and 50th Venice Biennale, Nicolai’s works were shown worldwide in extensive solo and group exhibitions. |
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