Art Review: Nam June Paik’s Work at Asia Society

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Holland Cotter

"Golden Buddha" by Nam June Paik at Asia Society

NEW YORK---If you want someone to praise or blame for the relentlessly wired, chatty, information-soaked 21st-century world we inhabit, the artist Nam June Paik is an apt candidate. The effort to situate this artist, who died in 2006, as a pioneer of the digital present seems to be the main impetus behind “Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot” at Asia Society, a large and good-looking show — designed by Clayton Vogel, it fills all of the museum’s galleries — that otherwise doesn’t seem to have any particular reason for being. In much of his art, Paik used technology, busy and brash, to create the equivalent of the wake-up slap of Zen master. Very occasionally, as here, he uses it to say something about nothing — about words, and information, and connectivity going away — and that takes mastery, too. [link]


Asia Society: “Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot” continues through Jan. 4 at Asia Society Museum, 725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street; 212-288-6400; asiasociety.org/new-york