Untitled, from the portfolio New York Collection for Stockholm

Born in Korea, educated in Japan and Germany, and later living and working in the United States, Nam June Paik created a unique visual language by integrating traditions from multiple cultures. He first gained fame as a member of the influential avant-garde Fluxus movement in the 1960s.

In this print, Paik repurposed an advertisement from a 1944 popular science magazine to offer a “new design for [a] TV-Chair.” The print references one of his earlier works, TV Chair (1968), in which he placed a television monitor in the seat of the chair and a camera above it. Here, Paik added rough sketches of “TV chairs” under the figures in the advertisement, as well as a series of typewritten questions playfully predicting the ubiquity of video art. In the bottom-right corner of the print, Paik dedicated the print to Ray Johnson, who shared a similar interest in questioning artistic modes of display, distribution, and access. Like Johnson’s mail art, Paik’s print references and repurposes images found in the American cultural lexicon.