An Empty Wall: Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha
Nam June Paik’s most famous video sculpture started as a gap-filler: a Buddha watching itself on a closed-circuit TV at Galeria Bonino in 1974.
In 1974, Nam June Paik needed something for an empty wall at his fourth show at Galeria Bonino in New York. Shortly before the opening, he turned an antique Buddha, bought as an investment and later described as purchased on Canal Street, into a viewer. A closed-circuit camera trained on the statue fed a monitor opposite it, so the Buddha watched its own image: past and present facing each other.
During Projekt ’74 in Cologne, Paik sat in the Buddha’s place, making the loop about himself as much as the sculpture. The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam acquired a version in 1977, the first time the work entered a museum collection, and he went on to produce many variants rather than freeze a single unique object.
What began as a practical fix became one of the defining images of early video art: stillness looking at itself through a machine that never stops scanning.
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