Rediscovering media artist Nam June Paik through nephew’s eyes

Video art pioneer Nam June Paik’s nephew and copyright holder Ken Hakuta speaks about Paik’s work "TV Bra for Living Sculpture" during a press walkthrough for “Nam June Paik: Rewind / Repeat,” a solo exhibition presented by Gagosian at APMA Cabinet in Seoul, Wednesday. Korea Times photo by Lee Hae-rin

Media artist Nam June Paik has returned to his hometown in the form of an intimate new exhibition that invites visitors into the artist’s world through the eyes — and stories — of his nephew and estate executor, Ken Hakuta.

The exhibition, “Nam June Paik: Rewind / Repeat,” opened Wednesday on the first floor of APMA Cabinet at Amorepacific’s headquarters in central Seoul, in collaboration with the Nam June Paik Estate and Gagosian. It is the first estate-led solo show for the artist in his birth city in 25 years, and brings together 11 works that are relatively unknown to the public.

“I’m sure today is a very happy day for Paik Nam June because he’s back in his home city of Seoul and he loves being in Korea,” Hakuta told reporters during a walkthrough, noting that Paik’s ashes rest at Bongeun temple just across the river.

‘TV Bra for Living Sculpture’

“TV Bra for Living Sculpture” (1969) is a transparent plastic brassiere embedded with two small television sets that was famously worn by cellist Charlotte Moorman in performances beginning in 1969. The work, last shown in Korea at Hoam Museum of Art in 2001, has returned after roughly a quarter of a century, following stops at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Guggenheim Bilbao.

For Hakuta, now 75, the piece is very personal, bringing back a charged teenage memory. “I had the great pleasure of removing her bra on and off when she was taking breaks,” he said with a laugh. “When Nam June found out that Charlotte was letting me change the bra on and off, he got really upset … he was yelling.”

Paik, who was Hakuta’s legal guardian in New York, was furious that his young nephew was involved in an intimate performance gesture. “He asked (Moorman): ‘How can you expose your breast to Ken?’” Hakuta recalled, adding that the cellist defended him as “a sensitive child.”

Looking closely at the object in Seoul, Hakuta highlighted its hand-crafted qualities and traces of collaboration. “You can tell that Nam June made this himself,” he said, pointing to Paik’s signature and Moorman’s handwritten instructions on how to fasten the work. “It’s quite heavy for traveling from performance to performance, so this is a very personal piece to me.”

Ken Hakuta, nephew of late artist Nam June Paik and holder of his copyrights, speaks about Paik's "Media Sandwich" during a press walkthrough for "Nam June Paik: Rewind / Repeat," a solo exhibition presented by Gagosian at APMA Cabinet in Seoul, Wednesday. Korea Times photo by Lee Hae-rin

‘Media Sandwich’

“Media Sandwich” (1961-64) is one of Hakuta’s favorite pieces. “It is such an important and interesting piece that if this is the last piece left in the estate, I would want it in my living room.”

The assemblage — a collage of mostly Korean and Japanese records, German technology magazines and a printed image of a man addressing a boy — dates from the early 1960s and has never been exhibited in Korea.

“This is one of his oldest pieces, from 1962, and this also has never been to Korea,” he said. The work, he explained, captures Paik at a point when he was “at the very beginning … thinking about doing video art,” shifting away from being a music composer and deciding to invent a new genre of media art rather than compete in a “crowded” field of painters.

Ken Hakuta, nephew of late artist Nam June Paik and holder of his copyrights, speaks about Paik's "For London and Abroad (Mailbox)" during a press walkthrough for "Nam June Paik: Rewind / Repeat," a solo exhibition presented by Gagosian at APMA Cabinet in Seoul, Wednesday. Yonhap

‘For London and Aborad (Mailbox)’

“For London and Abroad (Mailbox)” (1982) is a video installation first unveiled at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1982 and being shown in Korea for the first time. Hakuta noted that the compact work is one of only three surviving pieces from that landmark exhibition, with a small monitor on its front now relaying a live Korean TV channel in black and white, subtly connecting Paik’s early experiments with today’s media environment.

Curator Jon Hoffman, who manages Paik's posthumous works with Hakuta, described the piece as “about communication itself,” saying Paik imagined that if people could truly communicate, everyone could live together in harmony.

Other highlights on view include “Gold TV Buddha” (2005), a gilded bronze Buddha seated before a 27-inch monitor that shows a live feed of visitors standing next to it, and “Bakelite Robot” (2003), a robot-like sculpture built from vintage radios and a video screen that captures Paik’s playful fascination with technology and humankind.

Uncle and nephew

Hakuta’s ties with Paik stretch back to infancy. Born in Seoul in 1951, he moved through Japan to the United States, later earning an MBA from Harvard University and becoming known as a toy entrepreneur and host of the television program, “Dr. Fad Show.”

“I really loved having Nam June as my uncle because he told my mother that I should watch more TV and he told my mother to buy me a new TV,” he said with a smile. “But he did not like watching TV. When he watched TV, he always fell asleep.”

Video artist Nam June Paik photographed near his Ocean Drive apartment in Miami Beach, Fla., in 1990 / Courtesy of Gagosian

As Hakuta grew older, everyday life with Paik unfolded on the streets of New York. “I remember walking on Canal Street with Nam June to Chinatown to go to eat — that’s my memory because we did that so many times,” he said.

“We would go to buy newspapers on the street, and he always wanted the early edition of The New York Times. I remember the first time that his name was in The New York Times and he told me, ‘Do you know how hard it is to be in The New York Times?’”

That lifelong closeness eventually turned into the responsibility of managing Paik’s estate after the artist’s death in 2006, a role Hakuta still frames through family rather than bureaucracy.

Paik, prophet for the platform age

The exhibition also underscores how prescient Paik’s thinking about technology remains in the age of streaming platforms and artificial intelligence (AI).

Hakuta said his uncle, who coined the term “electronic superhighway” in 1971, consistently framed machines in human terms. “Nam June was always thinking about how technology would affect the world, and he wanted to humanize technology,” he said, adding that if Paik were alive now, “He would focus on putting a human heart into AI.”

Visitors look around "Nam June Paik: Rewind / Repeat," a solo exhibition presented by Gagosian at APMA Cabinet in Seoul, Wednesday. Yonhap

Gagosian Asia managing director Nick Simunovic agreed that Paik was “a kind of prophet” who “saw the future in a way that we can scarcely believe.”

In the early 1970s, he noted, Paik predicted that “in the future there will be more television channels than there are pages in the New York City telephone book,” which then ran to thousands of pages. “He could not have been more right about that prediction,” Simunovic said. “Today with Instagram, with YouTube, with TikTok, there are billions of television channels in the world. Everyone has their own television channel.”

Despite frictions with parts of the Korean art world over conservation, copyright and authenticity issues in the years after Paik’s death, Hakuta is using the occasion of this new exhibit to look ahead rather than back. With the artist’s centennial five years away, he said, a major commemorative exhibition in Korea would be “the best news,” adding that there is still plenty of time to plan something that could bring Paik’s legacy home again on a larger scale.

“Nam June Paik: Rewind / Repeat” runs through May 16 at APMA Cabinet.