Gaain Gallery
2009.01
Nam June Paik’s “TV Buddha,” which he presented extemporaneously in his fourth solo exhibition in 1974, is his representative work that is simple yet suggestive. This installation, in which an old statue of Buddha is facing its own image on a television screen projected by a video camera installed opposite the statue, received lavish praise at the time that it symbolized the meeting between the past and the present, and between a god of the east and the media of the west. Furthermore, it asks a philosophical question, given that what I (the Buddha) am currently looking at is nothing but myself (the Buddha image on TV), whether it is meaningless to distinguish clearly between the subject and object, and whether there is any fundamental difference between the physical real Buddha and the Buddha as a nonphysical image that are facing each other.