One of the highlights of Sundance Film Festival this year was Amanda Kim’s documentary Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV, which examined the life and work of the avant-garde Korean artist who helped to shape American art as it relates to technological advances. Executive produced by Steven Yeun, who reads the artist’s writings throughout the film, it’ll now arrive in the theaters next week and the first trailer has landed.
John Fink said in his Sundance review, “‘I use technology in order to hate it properly,’ pioneering video artist and self-identified cultural terrorist Nam June Paik says while explaining his playful, boundary-breaking work. A Ph.D. holder who speaks 20 languages––almost all quite badly––Paik is known as the father of video art, fantasizing early on about converting the medium of television into something other than passive work. It often broke the rules, incorporating onstage nudity, politics (including the satirization of John F. Kennedy shortly after his assassination), and the embrace of the future. For Paik, a student who lived history––he escaped Seoul at the beginning of the Korean War to study music in West Germany in the late 1950s––it’s the artist’s role to think about the future.”
See the trailer below.
Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV opens in theaters on March 24 and arrives on VOD on June 13.