Nam June Paik was a Korean video art pioneer, experimentalist and avant garde disruptor whose amazing, anarchic career – which flourished in 1960s and 70s New York – is recounted in this amusing and engaging documentary, the title of which is taken from one of his works: a luminous disc on a screen, telling us we gaze at the TV in the submissive way we once stared at the moon.
Minari’s Steven Yeun provides the voiceover for the artist’s own words and, among other things, this film shows us how exhausting it must be to do what he did: to insist, for decades, that his art, an art which bore no resemblance to anything that had gone before, had validity and meaning, while always being on the verge of poverty and physical breakdown. The overwhelming sense of vocation necessary for such a life is almost awe-inspiring, although Paik’s own jokey, opaque persona seems to exist as a rebuke to any reaction as bourgeois as that.
