GYEONGGI-DO.- “Cybernetics, the science of pure relations, or relationship itself, has its origin in karma...The Buddhists also say ‘Karma is samsara,’ and ‘Relationship is metempsychosis.’ We are in open circuits.” —Nam June Paik, “Cybernated Art,” Manifestos: A Great Bear Pamphlet, 1966
In his 1966 essay “Cybernated Art,” Nam June Paik used “relationship” as a language to connect modern technological concepts with Eastern thoughts. Instead of a world that coalesces all entities into a single order, the “open circuits” in his essay envisioned a realm in which diverse beings and signals influence one another to continuously reconfigure their surroundings.
The exhibition Stars, Trigrams examines the breadth of Paik’s cosmic vision, which gazed far beyond humanity and the Earth, and his reading of the world through the Eastern tradition of viewing things in shifting relationships — two elements that frequently intersected within his art. At the start of the exhibition, a gaze awaits something that has never arrived before. Staring at the sky in search of signals coming from beyond the boundaries of human experience and knowledge — this very act shifts the center of the cosmos to a far more distant realm than the one humanity currently stands in. It allows us to step away from our disposition as all-knowing, all-commanding beings and realigns us as just one constituent of the universe, alongside countless other existences yet unknown to us.
Moons: The Bright Rainbow Dots
July 16–October 4, 2026 / Gallery II artists: Nam June Paik, Doki Kim, Goeun Park, Jiyen Lee, Laure Prouvost, Laurent Grasso, Ryuta Aoki, Sky Hopinka, Soyoung Park,Unhappy the Cosmic Traveler.
Unlike other planets with their dozens of satellites, Earth’s Moon has been recognized as humankind’s one universal presence in the sky—something that can be sensed anywhere in the world, free from the constraints of time and space. And while Western culture has often read a sense of gloom into the moon, in Asian culture the moon has been a world of warm imagination, embodied in the figure of the “Moon Rabbit,” and a symbol of abundance and communal solidarity.
The exhibition Moons connects the many perspectives that emerge when we contemplate the moon as a “plural being,” from both inside and outside Earth, with Nam June Paik’s “planetary thinking,” and reopens The Moon is the Oldest TV (1965/2000), Neptune (1991), and Turtle (1993) to fresh interpretation. Through the works of contemporary artists who resonate with Paik’s thought, it then proposes a new vision of the cosmos as Paik saw it.
