Nam June Paik: Global Visionary

The first exhibition to open Nam June Paik's studio drawers to the public, and a book that argues his working method (hoarding, wiring, rewiring) matters as much as the finished walls of televisions.

Published for Nam June Paik: Global Visionary at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 13 December 2012 to 11 August 2013, which brought together 67 artworks and more than 140 items from the Nam June Paik Archive, acquired from the estate in 2009. John G. Hanhardt, the museum's consulting senior curator for film and media arts and the organiser of Paik surveys at the Whitney and the Guggenheim, contributes the central essay "Nam June Paik: From Avant-Garde to Post-Video Art"; the artist's nephew and estate executor Ken Hakuta writes "My Uncle Nam June Paik", with a foreword by Elizabeth Broun. Loans came from the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College. Alongside the plates the 208-page volume reproduces televisions, radios, antiques, toys, cameras, announcements and correspondence from the archive.

Hanhardt frames the book around a question of identity (Korean-born artist, video artist, Fluxus artist, performer, composer, German artist, American artist) and concludes that Paik (1932–2006) was all of them at once.