YONGIN-SI.- The 2025 solo exhibition, Play It Again, Paik, explores time as seen, heard, and experienced by Nam June Paik. At the heart of the exhibition are recordings of his past interviews. In a warm and often humorous manner, Paik explains video art, a concept that remained unfamiliar throughout the 1960s and 1970s. He likens video to painting and calmly demonstrates electronic technology. Above all, Paik continually discusses and writes about time, emphasizing that video, unlike other art forms, allows for a new experience of time.

Our experience of time varies. Sometimes it flies by like a flash, while other times, seconds can feel like years. Nam June Paik expressed this by stating that in “live” life, the relationship of input-time and output-time is much more complex. Video, in particular, is a medium well-suited for exploring these temporal properties. Moon is the Oldest TV is not a video of the moon in the night sky. Instead, a black-and-white television set is modified with electromagnets to temporarily disrupt the flow of electron beams, forming the shape of a moon. The video does not tell a story about the moon; in fact, it delivers no narrative at all. Viewers are left to experience a kind of abstract time.

This exhibition, which emerged from music and television, stands before each viewer’s time. Like a montage, it allows viewers to skip through time and space, yet it also invites them to experience different directions of time by comparing the varying temporal flows within each work. Here, absolute time and relative time, abstract time without narratives, linear and multidirectional time, fast-forwarded and rewound videotape time, plus time (memory) and minus time (forgetting) all continue to pass by.

Curator: Lee Soo Young, Lee Sangah

“I see twelve moons here. Time you can’t see. I want to make time visible and time you can grasp.” Nam June Paik, interview excerpt from WNET Television Station, Video Gallery Ⅲ, 1976