Aldo Tambellini and Nam June Paik Featured in Inaugural Exhibition at the Ulsan Art Museum

Work by CAVS Fellows Aldo Tambellini and Nam June Paik is featured in the Ulsan Art Museum’s inaugural exhibition.

One of Paik’s works on view is “Turtle,” which was originally showcased in Germany in 1993. Nearly 30 years later, the 10-meter-long video sculpture, composed of 166 vintage television monitors, now emits Paik’s iconic phantasmagoric collages of electronic images at the seaside Daewangam Park in the southeastern port city of Ulsan, as part of the permanent collection of the newly opened Ulsan Art Museum.

Along with Paik’s two other representative installations ― “Sistine Chapel,” a dizzying, overlapping projection of images onto the gallery’s walls and ceiling that earned the Golden Lion prize at the 1993 Venice Biennale and “Forest of Cage, Revelation of the Forest,” a nod to post-war avant-garde composer John Cage ― “Turtle” has become the centerpiece of the country’s first public art museum that is striving to become a “museum of the future” with its media art focus.

Ulsan Art Museum’s mission is to provide the physical platform and hardware to showcase cutting-edge, forward-thinking works of art, materialized by its five inaugural exhibitions.

The exhibition, “Black and Light: Aldo Tambellini,” is on view at the XR (extended reality) Lab. The lab is the first of its kind in a public museum in Korea, and is dedicated to immersive media art experiences created from digital technologies, including virtual reality, mixed reality and augmented reality.

The ongoing show features the rendered video of “We are the Primitives of a New Era” by Italian-American artist Aldo Tambellini, which became the last work of the late pioneer of “electromedia” before his death last year. His artistic practice, based on the tonal polarities of black and white, to visualize a mystical cycle of energy, fills the entire gallery space.

Aldo Tambellini was a fellow at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) from 1976-1984. During his time at CAVS, much of his work focused on video art.

Nam June Paik was a Fellow at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. His practice included video, television, and sculpture. He often collaborated with CAVS fellow Charlotte Moorman.

Full article by Park Han-sol for The Korea Times can be found here.