Back in October 2021, I went to see the Nam June Paik exhibit at SF MOMA. And wow, it was one of the most fun exhibits I’ve ever been to.

Paik was part of the Fluxus movement in the 60s, hanging out and making wild, experimental art with people like Charlotte Moorman, John Cage, and Joseph Beuys (I mentioned Beuys in The Artist As Shaman and Healer). Paik was one of the first artists to mess around with video, way before anyone really understood how big media would become. His work is weird, playful, and completely fearless.

One piece that stuck with me was Merce (1988), where he used a bunch of old TV sets to build a kind of human figure. It was clunky and charming at the same time.

Another fun one was Nixon (1965), where you can move this giant magnet around to warp a video of future-President Nixon. Totally interactive, and kind of hilarious in retrospect.

But my favorite piece was Random Access (1963, reconstructed for the show). Paik glued strips of audio tape all over a wall, and you got to drag an audio head across them to play the sounds. Depending on where you moved it and how fast, the sounds would change. It was messy, noisy, unpredictable, pure Paik.

They also had his most famous piece there: TV Buddha (1974). It’s simple. Just a Buddha statue watching itself on TV through a live camera feed, but it says so much with so little. Funny, eerie, and kind of profound all at once.

The whole show felt alive, like it could have been made yesterday. Here are some photos, but Paik’s work really has to be seen to be felt.