A Visual Riot Of Colour And Sound

National Gallery Singapore’s latest blockbuster exhibition, Nam June Paik: The Future is Now, catapults viewers back to a time when moving images were the next big thing.

- Lau Yunyi

Walking into the exhibition space on level three of National Gallery Singapore, the first exhibit to greet our eyes is One Candle (2004), a quiet and contemplative work featuring a specially sourced smokeless candle, mounted within a hollowed out vintage cathode-ray tube TV.

We whipped out our mobile phones to snap images and videos of this work, which has been described as one combining the Buddhist values of meditation with modern technology. Its combination of Eastern and Western philosophies and cultures is a trope that runs across Paik’s oeuvre, along with utopian ideas of how art and technology can come together as a positive force.

Korean-American artist Nam June Paik is widely regarded as a pioneer in video art who has greatly shaped the landscape of contemporary art today. Born in Seoul in 1932, Paik is considered a key figure in the avantgarde movements emerging in the 1960s from America and Europe, such as the Neo-dada collective.

In 1969, as an artist in residence at Boston TV station WGBH-TV, Paik built what he called a “video synthesiser” because there was nothing available at the time that allowed him to manipulate images in real time using various sources.