Korea Arts Council (ARKO) and the Nam June Paik Art Center will jointly host an international academic symposium, “Paik After Paik,” on April 23 at the ARKO Arts Theater Grand Theater in Seoul, ARKO said Tuesday.
The event marks the 20th anniversary of the death of video art pioneer Nam June Paik (1932-2006). Nine leading researchers from South Korea and abroad will review the state of Paik scholarship built over the past 60 years and discuss how his legacy can be reinterpreted within contemporary debates on art, technology and culture.
Organizers said the symposium approaches Paik not as a closed historical subject but as a field of inquiry that continues to be reshaped within today’s technological environment and systems of knowledge.
The program includes a keynote address, two sessions and a panel discussion. The keynote will be delivered by Hannah Higgins, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, who will revisit Paik’s experiments in the 1960s by linking them to conditions of learning and knowledge production in the age of artificial intelligence.
Session 1, “The Structural Terrain of Paik Studies,” will examine research methods and institutional foundations with a focus on curatorial practice, media theory and archives. Participants are Lee Sook-Kyung, director of the Whitworth at the University of Manchester in the U.K.; Lev Manovich, distinguished professor at the CUNY Graduate Center; Hannah Fajersztajn, collection coordinator for the Nam June Paik Archive at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; and art historian Son Boo-kyung.
Session 2 will broaden discussion by connecting Paik to 21st-century themes including data science, machines and labor, posthumanism and transnational cultural practice. Participants are Woo Jung-a, a professor at Pohang University of Science and Technology; Douglas Barrett, an assistant professor at Syracuse University; Lee Hyun-ae, an academic research professor at Chung-Ang University; and Jun Okada, an associate professor at Emerson College.
ARKO and the Nam June Paik Art Center said the symposium aims to build an international research network linking scholars, arts institutions and archives. It is their first joint academic project under a memorandum of understanding signed in December 2025, and organizers said it will serve as a starting point for cooperation including archival research, journal publication and international researcher exchanges.
ARKO Chairman Chung Byung-kuk said he hopes the symposium, through cooperation with the Nam June Paik Art Center, will help expand Paik research. “ARKO will continue to support efforts to invigorate discourse in the visual arts,” he said.
Park Nam-hee, director of the Nam June Paik Art Center, said the symposium will review accumulated scholarship and rethink it in light of contemporary technological environments and conditions of knowledge. She said she hopes it will encourage audiences to see Paik not only as a historical figure but as an open subject of research shaping the present and future.
The symposium is free and open to the public, with advance reservations recommended. More information is available on the ARKO and Nam June Paik Art Center websites.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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