Untitled 1975

In 1995, Nam June Paik made this drawing of four little mountainscapes, simply rendered with a pen on graph paper. Paik might have been thinking about landscapes as something that can be captured, transmitted, and transformed through technology. The mountain is pretty basic, two lines that meet at a peak. But then this energetic burst of lines emerges, and there's an energy radiating outwards. The more you look, the more you feel a playful quality to this piece, like it's constantly shifting and reconfiguring itself before your eyes. Paik was a pioneer, always pushing the boundaries of what art could be, and I wonder if he wasn't thinking about Japanese landscape painting here. Hokusai's famous wave comes to mind; there is a dialogue that runs through all art, where artists borrow, steal, and riff off one another's ideas across time. When you draw or paint, you are also participating in this very, very long conversation.