The Nam June Paik Art Center (Director: Park Namhee) has announced its major initiatives for 2026, grounded in the Center’s vision of “a museum connected through art and technology.” Reflecting this vision, the museum will actively implement exhibitions, educational programs, academic projects, and public events throughout the year.
 
In particular, 2026 marks the 20th anniversary of the passing of Nam June Paik. On this occasion, the museum aims to foster a “Heritage Community” that shares and commemorates Paik’s artistic spirit with audiences worldwide, reexamining the contemporary significance of his art as a public cultural asset.
 
Accordingly, the 2026 program will center on the theme “The Era of the 21st-Century Heritage Community: A Platform for Hyperconnected Sharing.” The museum plans to expand collaborations with media artists, museums, and cultural institutions both in Korea and internationally, developing programs that organically connect research and creation with viewing and participation.
 
The major initiatives for 2026 include: international exchange and co-organized exhibitions; educational programs tailored to different generations and audiences; academic research and publications; commemorative events and memorial projects, including the Nam June Paik Art Prize; and a Media Art Festival encompassing exhibitions, education, performances, and screenings.
 
Through these efforts, the museum seeks to reconnect Nam June Paik’s art with contemporary society as a “shareable heritage,” establishing a foundation for its continued expansion as a living discourse in collaboration with institutions and communities around the world.

Exhibition: Expanding Nam June Paik’s Art through Global Co-Curation
 
In 2026, the Nam June Paik Art Center will foreground co-organized exhibitions to offer a multilayered examination of the expansiveness and contemporary relevance of Nam June Paik’s art. Revisiting Paik’s concept of “connection”—which traversed art and technology, music and performance, television and satellite, the local and the global—the museum will reconsider this framework within today’s media environment and translate it into tangible experiences for audiences.
 
A key exhibition in this program is the co-organized show with the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, 《Circuits of Chance》, opening on March 19. The exhibition surveys the New Tendencies movement that emerged in the Eastern European art scene from the 1960s onward, as well as broader currents that expanded the sensibility of contemporary media art through the deconstruction of traditional art forms and experimental engagements with new media.
 
Through its collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, the Nam June Paik Art Center will introduce Eastern European artists to Korean audiences while reexamining, from a contemporary perspective, the terrain of influence shaped by Paik as a pioneer of media art. Approximately sixteen Eastern European artists will participate, exploring through their works how seemingly “discontinuous” historical trajectories have generated new points of connection over time.

In November, as part of Hyundai Motor Company’s art partnership initiative, the “Hyundai Translocal Series”, the Nam June Paik Art Center will co-present 《Hyundai Translocal Series》 in collaboration with the Pinacoteca de São Paulo.
 
Prior to the exhibition, curators from both institutions engaged in a research exchange program and forum exploring translocal themes, forming the basis for the jointly organized exhibition.
 
The exhibition will feature newly commissioned works by four selected artists—Jane Jin Kaisen, Christine Sun Kim, Vivian Caccuri, and biarritzzz—alongside major works by Nam June Paik, including Moon is the Oldest TV (1965/2000). The exhibition will be presented both at the Nam June Paik Art Center and at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in Brazil.

Academic Programs: International Symposium and Archival Research
 
In the academic sphere, an international symposium titled “The Current State and Assessment of Nam June Paik Studies” will be co-hosted on April 23 at the ARKO Theater in collaboration with the Arts Council Korea. Marking the 20th anniversary of the passing of Nam June Paik, the joint symposium organized by the Nam June Paik Art Center and Arts Council Korea will review the trajectory of Nam June Paik scholarship and explore future directions for research.
 
Approximately ten distinguished scholars from Korea and abroad will participate, including keynote speaker Hannah Higgins, Lev Manovich, Jun Okada, Bookyung Son, and Woo Jung-ah, sharing key achievements in Paik studies and discussing their potential for contemporary expansion. Based on the symposium papers, the museum also plans to publish the 16th issue of its online academic journal, NJP Reader, to further disseminate scholarly outcomes.
 
In addition, the Nam June Paik Art Center has been strengthening the public accessibility of its archives, operating the Nam June Paik Video Library streaming service based on a collection of approximately 2,285 video works. In 2026, the museum will publish Video Collection Highlights, a comprehensive guide to the Nam June Paik video archive featuring commentaries on major works and scholarly essays. This publication aims to expand research resources in a format accessible not only to scholars but also to general audiences, thereby fostering archive-based discourse.

Events: 20th Anniversary Commemoration and Award Programs
 
In 2026, marking the 20th anniversary of the passing of Nam June Paik, the Nam June Paik Art Center will present a series of commemorative events and award programs. In advance, the Center held a memorial event titled AI Robot Opera over two days, January 28–29, in observance of Paik’s anniversary on January 29.
 
In addition, the museum will select the recipient of the 9th Nam June Paik Prize and hold an award ceremony. The Nam June Paik Prize is presented to an artist who embodies the power of art to contribute to world peace and advances the development of contemporary art. The prize seeks to reflect on and disseminate the contemporary significance of Paik’s artistic vision—rooted in experimental and creative inquiry and a dream of a conflict-free society—together with artists of today.
 
Established in 2009, the Nam June Paik Prize is awarded biennially, with the recipient selected one year and a solo exhibition of the awardee presented the following year.

Nam June Paik Media Art Festival: A Hyperconnected Platform Linking Exhibition, Education, Performance, and Screenings
 
The Nam June Paik Art Center will launch the Media Art Festival as its core platform for 2026. Marking the 20th anniversary of the passing of Nam June Paik, the festival will organically interweave exhibitions with academic programs, performances, screenings, and lounge programs. It is designed to expand the experience of Paik’s art beyond viewing toward active participation and shared engagement.
 
As part of the festival, the exhibition The Planet of Nam June Paik: Waiting for UFO, opening simultaneously on July 16, will occupy the entirety of Galleries 1 and 2 at the Art Center. The two-part exhibition will focus respectively on Paik’s cosmology and planetary works: one section will concentrate on his later artistic practice through the lens of cosmological and planetary thought, while the other will present works by contemporary artists that extend the technological and philosophical inquiries embedded in Paik’s planetary projects.
 
The exhibition aims to explore the meaning of the “planetary thinking” Paik constructed, tracing the East Asian astronomical and cosmological order underlying his trajectory and articulating it through the grammar of a “planetary circuit.”
 
Through newly commissioned works by contemporary artists who expand the technological and conceptual dimensions of Paik’s planetary practice, the exhibition further seeks to examine how the notion of the “planetary circuit” may be reconfigured in the present.

In conjunction with the exhibition openings, the festival will present a Media Art Performance program, expanding the liveness and event-based nature of Nam June Paik’s art. Reinterpreting the sense of the “live” that Paik emphasized within today’s bodily and technological environments, the performances will offer audiences a point of encounter where they can directly experience the temporality and immediacy of art.
 
The three-day Media Art Performance program, organized as part of the 20th anniversary commemoration and in connection with the 140th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Korea and France, will bring together Korean and French performers to explore “the sound generated through relationships” through music and installation, investigating sound and language as shared artistic terrain.
 
In addition, screening programs will be presented outside the Nam June Paik Art Center to strengthen the spirit of the “Heritage Community” and connect with diverse audiences and spaces beyond the museum. In the second half of the year, the Center will collaborate with the Korean Film Archive to organize the Nam June Paik Screening Series, introducing Paik’s works within a broader context through partnerships between media art and film institutions.
 
The screening program for emerging media artists, NJP Lounge, will also serve as a key component of the festival. Designed to present contemporary media art in non-museum spaces, the program creates flexible opportunities for artists and audiences to meet within everyday settings.
 
Park Namhee, Director of the Nam June Paik Art Center, stated, “The Nam June Paik Art Center aspires to become a hyperconnected platform for shared exchange on a planetary circuit, opening the era of a 21st-century Heritage Community in which Nam June Paik’s artistic spirit connects and resonates with the present.”

References

• 백남준아트센터 보도자료 (Nam June Paik Art Center Press Release)