Ling U

Sook-Kyung LEE is Senior Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, where she works across exhibitions, collection displays and acquisitions. She has overseen the strategic vision and programming for the ‘Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational’ since 2019, a major multi-year research initiative for curatorial innovation. Lee curated a number of major exhibitions at Tate, including Nam June Paik (2019-20, Tate Modern) and Doug Aitken: The Source (2012-13, Tate Liverpool as part of Liverpool Biennial). She has also curated several collection-based exhibitions and displays at Tate Modern, such as A Year in Art: Australia 1992 (2021-22), CAMP (2019-21), and Xiao Lu and Niki de Saint Phalle (2018-19). She also served as the Commissioner and Curator of the Korean Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale.

Nam June Paik (1932-2006) lived and worked in several ideal arenas for creative experimentation including Seoul, Tokyo, Düsseldorf and New York. He found and developed artistic camaraderie in each of these locations. Paik’s encounters with peers stimulated his avant-garde interests, and in turn, his presence contributed to the development of experimental artistic communities.

This talk addresses Paik’s art with a focus on transnational connectedness. Influenced by his experience in colonialism, war, migration and globalisation, Paik’s art centred around a global community of creators and audiences. Paik freely dipped into diverse cultures and new technologies in a manner he described as ‘random access’, establishing a hybrid construct that defied any assumed characteristics of specific countries or cultures of origin.

As Paik predicted, the world is shrinking with the improved mobility, internet, worldwide media as well as multinational corporations and globalised market. The recent pandemic highlighted profound challenges and questions within the interconnected world, and it further imbalanced international relationships, deepening the precarity of such a world. Looking at Paik’s art reveals how art can predict future paths and also consciously shape and transform undetermined futures. A sense of equity and solidarity is crucial in transnational exchanges, as seen in the collaborations Paik and his fellow creators established.

Yu-Chieh LI
Yu-Chieh Li is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Studies at Lingnan University. She has held research positions at UNSW Art and Design, Tate Research Centre: Asia, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Li’s research engages with aesthetics of performance art in Asia and postcolonial discourses. Her publications appear in Third Text, World Art, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, and the MoMA’s art platform ‘post: notes on art in a global context,’ with an edited volume Visual Representations of the Cold War and Postcolonial Struggles recently published by Routledge (co-edited with Midori Yamamura).