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Former neighbors Joan Jonas and Nam June Paik 'reunite' at exhibition in Korea

Published: 21 Nov. 2025, 13:40

LEE JIAN
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A video installation by Joan Jonas is on display at the Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin, Gyeonggi. [NAM JUNE PAIK ART CENTER]

YONGIN, Gyeonggi — Pioneers of 20th-century video art, Nam June Paik (1932–2006) and Joan Jonas once lived only a courtyard away from each other's windows in SoHo, New York, while Paik was still alive.

Two decades later, the two have seemingly met once again in Korea — with Jonas exhibiting works at the Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin, Gyeonggi.

The center on Thursday opened Jonas’s first solo show in the country, “Joan Jonas: The More-than-Human World.” Featuring 41 works across video, drawing and installation, along with an extensive archival display, the exhibition celebrates Jonas’s selection as the final winner of the eighth Nam June Paik Prize. The biennial award, funded by the Gyeonggi provincial government and administered by the Nam June Paik Art Center, honors artists who advance contemporary art while demonstrating how the power of art can nurture mutual understanding and contribute to world peace.

“Paik and Jonas were artists who inhabited the same scene, supported one another and explored a new artistic language side by side,” said curator Kim Yeon-soo.

“Although Nam June Paik and Joan Jonas approached the medium of video from different angles, their earliest experiments share important points of convergence,” she continued. “Both artists were fascinated by the immediacy of video — the live transmission, the real-time feedback, and the question of how people respond when confronted with a moving image that unfolds in the present moment. These aspects of immediacy and live quality were central to early video experimentation, and we hope the exhibition brings renewed attention to these shared foundations.”

Works by Joan Jonas, collectively dubbed "Empty Rooms" are on display at the Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin, Gyeonggi. [YONHAP]

Jonas, 89, is a multimedia visual artist who has worked across film, painting, drawing, installation and sculpture since the 1960s. She rose to prominence through her early video and performance works created using portable video cameras and television monitors. Over time, her practice has expanded to explore the relationships between civilization and nature, and between human and nonhuman entities.

She represented the United States at the 2015 Venice Biennale and has been the subject of major retrospectives, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York earlier this year and at Tate Modern in London in 2018.

Paik, internationally recognized as the “father of video art,” pioneered the use of television and emerging electronic technologies to create influential video sculptures, installations and performances. He famously envisioned the future of global telecommunications with concepts such as the “Electronic Superhighway.” His work was presented in a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2000. Paik received numerous prestigious honors, including the Golden Lion at the 1993 Venice Biennale, the Kyoto Prize in 1998 and the Goethe Medal the same year.

Jonas’s exhibition consists of three sections.

The first, titled “Experiment: Radical Movements," examines the works that emerged from the artistic and social energy of New York in the 1960s and ’70s. The video “Wind” (1968) — showing performers moving against strong winds on the Long Island shore — encapsulates the essence of Jonas’s early experiments, which probed the interactions between nature, humanity and technology.

“The artist was struck by the immediacy with which her actions and bodily movements, captured by the camera, appeared instantaneously on the monitor — a sensation shared by many artists experimenting with video at the time,” the curatorial text explains. “In these early explorations, she often appeared as the performer herself, using her own body as the primary tool of inquiry.”

Jonas’s continued presence in her performances is tied to the rise of feminism in the United States and the ways mass media portrayed and circulated images of the female body. Her work engaged critically with these conditions, forming the foundation for the representational questions that still guide her practice.

“Journey: Spirits of Nature and Animal Helpers” traces Jonas’s shift in the late 1980s from a human-centered perspective to a more ecological one. “River, Flight or Pattern III” (2016–17) brings together objects and footage collected during her travels, juxtaposing scenes from diverse cultures with natural conditions such as wind and light.

A video installation by Joan Jonas is on display at the Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin, Gyeonggi. [YONHAP]

Another work, “Beautiful Dog” (2014), features scenes filmed from the perspective of her dog, Ozu, playfully blurring the boundary between species and complicating the distinction between animal and human perception.

The final section, “Symbiosis: Dialogues of Revival and Transmission," highlights Jonas’s most recent works, which synthesize the themes that have recurred throughout her career. In the immersive installation “Empty Rooms,” Jonas layers wall drawings, video projections, paper elements hanging from the ceiling and a whale sculpture, creating an environment where her longstanding interests converge.

The curators emphasize that the show is not a retrospective.

“Our aim, rather, was to foreground Joan Jonas’s own perspective within a more focused thematic framework that traces how her artistic viewpoints shift and expand over the course of her career,” Kim said.

“Joan Jonas: The More-than-Human World” runs through March 29.

BY LEE JIAN [lee,[email protected]]