At the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art (Watari-um) in Tokyo, Nam June Paik: The 20th anniversary of his passing unfolds across three compact floors from Jul 19\u2013Nov 23, 2026. Paik\u2014widely known as the \u201cfather of video art\u201d\u2014left a prescient roadmap for the media-saturated present. In a 1974 essay, he wrote: \u201cThe mass entertainment TV as we see it now will be divided into, or rather gain many branches and tails of, differentiated video cultures, Picture-Phone, tele-facsimile. . . . They all will form a new nuclear energy in information and society-building.\u201d Paik passed away in 2006; this exhibition asks how his insights read two decades on.<\/p>\n
The survey draws from the museum\u2019s collection with mixed-media installations, works on paper, and personal documents, building an immersive atmosphere from the ground floor up. Visitors first step into a dim den pitched between a lush forest and an abandoned broadcast studio: wood debris underfoot, tropical foliage unfurling, and retro TV sets appearing to sprout from the branches. Near the entrance, TV Egg<\/em> (1982) sits on a mound of mulch ringed by ferns, its cathode-ray tube sending abstract moving images across the glass. The deceptively organic form nods to cosmogenesis and to the seductions\u2014and misdirections\u2014of technology. As one moves inward, a low thrum swells into an enveloping sound field of Zen Buddhist chanting, zither notes, audience laughter, and static. Some monitors carry black-and-white footage from Paik\u2019s early 1960s Fluxus performances; others splice monks meditating before dawn into bursts of saturated color.<\/p>\n Two works created for Paik\u2019s 1993 solo show at Watari-um anchor this resonance between past and present. Time in Triangular<\/em> (1993) riffs on the museum\u2019s own architecture and New York\u2019s Flatiron Building: neon tubes pick out a prow while screens sheath the walls, cycling clips from films and commercial TV distorted through a synthesizer. Nearby, Forest of Cage \/ Revelation of the Forest<\/em> (1993) gathers 20-plus bulky TVs in a densely planted grove, each pulsing kaleidoscopic imagery. A descendant of TV Garden<\/em> (1974\u201377), the piece salutes American composer John Cage (1912\u20131992), Paik\u2019s friend and mentor. In this spirit, Paik elevated the glitch as creative tactic and political prod, needling the corporate grip of telecommunication systems and reminding viewers that the screen can be a manipulable\u2014at times even \u201cdictatorial\u201d\u2014medium.<\/p>\n The top floor turns quietly elegiac. Candle TV<\/em> (1968)\u2014a worn, hollowed-out Emerson set cradling a single flame\u2014reads like a vigil for obsolete devices and the memories they once framed. It also opens onto larger questions the show raises about a world shaped by algorithms, cybernetic economies, and AI computing: what becomes of collective feeling under such intensities? Paik did not live to see all of these pressures, yet the exhibition keeps faith with his impulse to prod, tamper with, and disrupt the apparatus\u2014if only to keep the human touch alive within it.<\/p>\n1993 at Watari-um, Revisited<\/h2>\n