Lee, Won-Gon (Professor of Theory of Media Art, Dankook University)

I think it was about 5~6 years ago when I was appointed by the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation to be one of the members of the “Center’s” Construction Committee (?) and I participated in the process of purchasing the works of the deceased, who was committed to his sickbed at the time. After that, I haven’t had much connection with the Center, but I am well aware that Paik Nam June Art Center went through a long and hard birth pains. Now, after having endured the difficult times, Paik Nam June Art Center is finally opening its doors amidst blessings of many people, and I gladly join in their applause.

However, as I wrote this, I realized while it would be easy to package this Art Center’s mission and direction with flowery words, actual implementation of the mission given to the institution in order to fulfill its ‘name value’ would be a truly difficult task. I look forward to the activities of Director Lee Yeong-cheol and all related people, and I will try to summarize my expectations for the Art Center.

First, there would be no room for objections in that Paik Nam June Art Center should be the center for wholly preserving, researching and expanding all resources and works related to Paik Nam June. Furthermore, I hope that the Art Center will establish itself as the world center in this field, and so develop to become a new pride for all Koreans, just as Paik Nam June did.

Also, in order for the new Art Center to realize the meaning of its existence, it would need a strategic move for itself. More than anything, isn’t this center one of the cultural devices that is built upon a real and concrete history of “Paik Nam June”? It is therefore, necessary for the Art Center to take its birth conditions as the lever and determine the horizon that it is to cultivate in the future. We could call this “Specialization Strategy”. It is a roadmap that will allow the Art Center to look frankly at the basic conditions it has, to make full use of those conditions, and maximize its advantages. Each and every action should be planned upon that comprehensive strategy.

It is natural for us to think of the words ‘media art’ when we think about Paik Nam June Art Center. However, ‘media art’ has become a sort of buzzword that is being abused in ambiguous positions. All sorts of other words dance around the edges of this word, such as ‘multimedia’, ‘digital’, ‘hi-tech’, ‘union of art and technology’, ‘form of conversation’ and ‘virtual reality’, and myriads of fields from pure experimental art to software industry, from humanities to advertisements are swirling and entangled with each other. As has been done many times before, the easy-going attitude that creates a theme park filled with ‘unusual toys’, and then mobilizes outdated slogans such as ‘union between art and state-of-the-art technology’ to describe their activity is a problem. However, I do not believe new perspectives will open up without awareness and earnest ponderings about the new information culture that has already infiltrated our daily lives; the domain of ‘art’ that has been expanded so much that it cannot be fully explained just by using the word “art” of the past; and the art system which is being reorganized due to such phenomena, and the future that is being prepared at this very moment in laboratories. I hope that Paik Nam June Art Center will be able to connect media and culture, humanities and science technology, the primitive and the future, and guide them to interact with each other within the swirl rising at the edges of ‘media art’, and become the venue for creating new languages and consciousness.

Lastly, this may also sound like an old rhetoric, but I believe this Art Center must become a starting point that will open up the horizon rising above ‘Paik Nam June’. Looking back, the life of this man Paik Nam June makes us reflect upon many things. He was born in a country located at the edges of the Eurasian Continent – a small and poor country, which at the time had hardly any political powers, a country unknown to many people, and a country, which had suffered several tragedies. From here he crossed to the other side of the earth empty handed, unable to return freely to his home country because he was a military draft evader. Standing at the central stage of the western culture, he put forth his own rules, and played his own game. In other words, Paik is completely different from other countless Korean scholars who studied abroad to learn the logics and methodology of the ‘great’ western art’, and later communicated them to this ‘undeveloped’ land, and found reasons for their existence in that role. Paik was a different type of man. (Perhaps that was possible because he was not in a position to enjoy a comfortable status.)

Paik was also an idealist who emphasized the visions of new civilization, and probably thought of new media as the tool and the key for composing the cultural paradigm and vision that will be reorganized in the future. After setting up the shrine for this giant, if we were to continue to just reconfirm our small and shabby self within, it will only be a repetition of our tragic history. Art Center must not become the tool for cultural infantilistic patients who only lament about not possessing the values and the systems of so-called ‘main stream’ players, who always ruminate the outdated texts of the west, and who cannot even say a few words of their own if they do not depend on that authority. What I hope from Paik Nam June Art Center is that it will become the venue for nurturing ambitions that will race through this era, an era of great cultural transition, and an era where diastrophism is always occurring. Just as the great giant Paik Nam June did.