The Arts Council Korea (ARKO), in collaboration with the Nam June Paik Art Center, will co-host the international academic symposium 《Paik After Paik》 on April 23 at the main theater of the ARKO Arts Theater in Seoul.
 
Organized to mark the 20th anniversary of the passing of Nam June Paik (1932–2006), a pioneer of video art, the symposium will bring together nine leading scholars from Korea and abroad. It aims to review the trajectory of Paik studies over the past six decades and to discuss how his legacy can be reinterpreted within contemporary discourses on art, technology, and culture.
 
In particular, the symposium is significant in that it approaches Nam June Paik not as a closed historical figure, but as an evolving field of contemporary inquiry—continuously reconfigured within today’s technological environments and systems of knowledge.

The symposium will consist of a keynote lecture, two sessions, and a panel discussion. The keynote will be delivered by Hannah B. Higgins (Professor in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Illinois Chicago), who will reinterpret Nam June Paik’s experiments of the 1960s in relation to contemporary conditions of learning and knowledge production in the age of artificial intelligence.
 
Session 1, “Mapping the Fields,” examines the methodological and institutional frameworks of Paik studies through the lenses of curatorial practice, media theory, and archives. Participants include Sook-Kyung Lee (Director of The Whitworth and Professor of Curatorial Practices at the University of Manchester), Lev Manovich (Presidential Professor at The Graduate Center, City University of New York), Hannah Pacious (Nam June Paik Archive Collections Coordinator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum), and Bookyung Son (art historian).

Session 2 expands the discussion on Nam June Paik by engaging with key 21st-century discourses, including data science, machines and labor, the posthuman, and transnational cultural practices.
 
Participants include Jung-Ah Woo (Professor and Head of the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at POSTECH), G. Douglas Barrett (Assistant Professor in the TV, Radio and Film Department at the Newhouse School, Syracuse University), Hyun-ae Lee (Research Professor at Chung-Ang University), and Jun Okada (Associate Professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College).
 
The symposium aims to build an international network for Nam June Paik studies by connecting researchers, institutions, and archives both in Korea and abroad. As the first joint academic initiative following a memorandum of understanding signed in December 2025 between ARKO and the Nam June Paik Art Center, it marks the starting point for future collaborations, including archival research, academic publications, and international scholarly exchange.

References

• 한국문화예술위원회 보도자료 (Arts Council Korea Press Release)
• 백남준아트센터, [심포지엄] 백남준 이후의 백남준 (Nam June Paik Art Center, [Symposium] Paik After Paik)