[Opinion] Paik Nam-june’s Performance

Who are world-renowned Korean artists? Among them are conductor-pianist Chung Myung-whun, vocalist Jo Su-mi, ballerina Kang Soo-jin, and violinist Chung Kyung-wha. But many more place video artist Paik Nam-june (72) at the top of the list. That is because unlike other artists who have achieved a great accomplishment in the existing genre, Paik Nam-june is one who created an art genre.

Before video art, performance art was what first moved him into the spotlight. Performance art, often called happening or event art, is an art genre that uses the human body to reveal a desire for expression that is impossible to represent in existing or traditional art genres. In modern art, a good example is John Cage’s 1952 work “4`33",” in which the artist ends his performance by playing nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds. This spread like a trend through the “Fluxus,” the representative avant-garde group of the 1960s.

In one instance, Paik Nam-june presented another performance at the end of 1959 when he violently smashed a piano in Gallery 22 in Düsseldorf, Germany. His performances have been famous for unexpected actions. He once cut off an audience member’s necktie and t-shirt, poured water into a shoe and drank it, and hung the severed head of a bull on a gallery door. In New York, he collaborated with classical cellist Charlotte Moorman, and in one of his works she performed naked, which is, in other words, Paik “played” the cellist. In his meeting with President Bill Clinton at the White House in 1998, as the artist left his wheelchair and was shaking hands with the president, his pants suddenly dropped, showing that the artist was missing his underwear. Some members of the U.S. media viewed this Paik performance as an allusion to then-president Clinton’s zippergate controversy.

For Paik, performance is “shock therapy,” to let the world know the name of the artist from a small Asian country. When I met him a few years ago, he told me, chuckling, “They showed no interest in me no matter how hard I tried. So, I made a robot and made it wander around, and that was on the New York Times. It seemed to work for a couple of times afterwards, but soon they lost interest again. So I squashed the robot with a car, and that was in the headlines.” Paik, confined to his wheelchair for nine years due to a stroke, is preparing for his new performance on Wednesday in New York. He once exclaimed that art is fraud. We can’t help but wonder what the artist’s next high-class fraud will be.

Oh Myeong-cheol, Editorial writer, oscar@donga.com