Media Canvas
Period : Apr 15 ― Apr 30, 2011
Venue : Seoul Square Media Canvas
Nam June Paik’s consists of thirty videos, about five minutes long each, which were originally broadcast after late-night TV programs of Channel 13/W-Net in the early 1970s. In collaboration with Jud Yalkut, Douglas Davis and Russell Connor, Nam June Paik produced this series as a “personal New York sketchbook” presenting the mediascape of New York from multiple angles. One of the series, ‘The Selling of New York’, for example, juxtaposes statistical information about the city enumerated by a TV announcer and diverse responses of New Yorkers to it. Paik reveals the city life changed and dominated by the mammoth media and information industries. There are other brilliant videos in the series, showing crowded subway stations, Chinatown streets, glittering night views, building reconstruction sites, and interviews with pedestrians. Paik’s unique electronic collage using colorisation captures the cityscape in a flashy and rather dizzy way. The exhibition in the NJP Art Center is showing the whole series of in a wall projection and a variety of old television sets. In addition, one of the series was selected to go outside the NJP Art Center, specifically for the screening on the media facade of Seoul Square Building. It is ‘Fashion Avenue’, a dazzling collage of New York’s street fashion, Chinatown peddlers, fashion models, cosmetics commercials, and so forth. Through the grand screen of the Seoul Square Media Canvas, Paik’s electronic sketch of New York is changing yet again the mediascape of Seoul in 2011.
