Small Notebook

Small Notebook

Whenever artistic ideas came to mind, Nam June Paik whimsically scribbled them out, unhesitatingly on whatever was available at the moment, on the margins of book pages or on a restaurant’s napkins. Paik also built up his ideas by jotting down things cumulatively on a notebook. In this 50-page notepad whose cover features Snoopy of the comic strip Peanuts, Paik transcribed part of 41st and 42nd Hexagrams from the Book of Changes. Hexagram 41 for Decrease, named 損 ‘diminishing,’ consists of its inner trigram 澤 ‘swamp,’ and its outer trigram 山 ‘mountain.’ Hexagram 42 for Increase named 益 ‘augmenting,’ consists of its inner trigram 雷 ‘thunder,’ and its outer trigram 風 ‘wind.’ From Paik’s elegant handwriting you can see the extent to which he mastered the characters and their meanings. The first page of the notepad contains something like a math equation, which is in fact Paik’s drawing that only uses question marks to express two faces looking at each other and a heart form.