Dear friends,

Happy solstice! I’ve just returned from a trip to California and Chicago and have been delighting in fireflies and full-leafed foliage. I hope you, too, are enjoying these long summer days.

As promised, here’s part 2 of the essay from earlier this month 😎

Til the next quarter moon,

~Chenxing

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Moon is the Oldest TV (II)

Read part 1 here

Written in communication with the artworks at the opening reception for the CLUSTER Museum exhibition I Hate Technology In Order to Use it Properly: Kim DeBord and Zach Debord’s Pisces, Joo Won Park’s Control Click, Linh My Truong’s Expand/Contract and Shigeko, Julie Zhu’s Scribble Scores and Ornithology. 

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Remember when tweets were still a thing? What if every chirp was a seed, bird-shat into the loam of our consciousness? What future forest—twisted trees, strange fruit—are we growing? 

We peck at our screens. The karmic repercussions peck back. 

🎮

In Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life, Vietnamese Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh issues a warning. 

Mass media is the food for our eyes, ears, and minds. When we watch television, read a magazine, watch a film, or play a video game, we are consuming sensory impressions… Be mindful of what you watch, read, and listen to, and protect yourself from the fear, despair, anger, craving, anxiety, or violence they promote. The material goods they promise are only quick, temporary fixes.

Nam June Paik said the same thing in a different register:

I use technology in order to hate it properly.

And also: 

I didn’t try to win the game but I want invent new rule of game.

🤑
Shigeko Kubota’s Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase (1976) was the first video sculpture acquired by MoMA. “Nam June was stunned,” Kubota recalled. “It was I who had earned cash money.”

Like the man who eventually became her husband, Shigeko Kubota was Buddhist-raised and John Cage–influenced, a prolific avant-garde artist and a pioneer in video art, though her legacy remains eclipsed by Paik’s.

Kubota and Paik lived in financial precarity. She surprised him by bringing in the dough with the MoMa acquisition, and chewed him out for spending money like water.

“One day, he came back with ugly buddha,” Kubota remembers. “I said, why did you buy the buddha? He said, well today’s my birthday.”

On his 41st birthday, Paik spent their last $10,000 on a bronze antique Buddha statue.

“Buddha watch people but not TV,” said Paik, who was about to change that.

“I said, who will buy?”

The rest, of course, is history. In TV Buddha, first produced in 1974, a Buddha statue regards its own image on a TV monitor. The image on the screen comes from a live video camera pointed at the Buddha.

“Boom! Cash and bought it for Stedelijk Museum. I couldn’t believe it!” said Kubota. 

“Then he made so many Buddhas, because Buddha bring him money!”

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The Shurangama Sutra lists ten profound analogies that lead bodhisattvas to awakening. Here are the odd-numbered ones, a tribute to Paik in his superlative oddity: 

1) All karma is like an illusion.

3) All physical bodies are like the moon in water.

5) All wondrous sounds are like echoes in a valley.

7) All deeds of the Buddha are like dreams.

9) The Reward-body is like a shadow.

In his “Cybernated Art” manifesto from 1966, Paik writes:

Cybernetics, the science of pure relations, or relationship itself, has its origins in karma.

His one-page manifesto with five emoji-like bullet points mentions George Brecht, Louis Pasteur, Maximilien Robespierre, and Marshall McLuhan before ending on a dharmic note: 

Newton’s physics is the mechanics of power and the unconciliatory two-party system, in which the strong win over the weak. In the 1920’s a German genius put a tiny third-party (grid) between these two might poles (cathode and anode) in a vacuum tube, thus enabling the weak to win over the strong for the first time in human history. It might be a Buddhistic “third way,” but anyway this German invention led to cybernetics, which came to the world in the last war to shoot down German planes from the English sky.

The Buddhists also say
Karma is samsara
Relationship is metempsychosis

We are in open circuits

Thirty-four years after leaving Korea, Paik finally visits the country of his birth. Why the late return, an interviewer asks. 

Paik pauses a moment before responding. 

“Life is but an empty dream.”

He wasn’t in it for the usual rewards. The Whitney Museum’s first retrospective of a video artist was in 1982. Its subject, Nam June Paik, slinked out early, a salmon against the rush of admirers.

“I have to go. I have big work to do,” says Paik. 

“You’re supposed to rest now,” someone protests.

“Whatever,” mutters Paik. “Now work.”

📻

Moon is the Oldest TV is full of aphorisms.

“Korean war: single factor that decided my life absolutely.”

“History will repeat itself if we don’t plan the future carefully.”

“I’d rather make mistakes for a reason than succeed for no reason.” He says this line in German.

Paik is prone to poetic license.

“I’m a poor man from poor country so I have to entertain people at every second,” says the son born into one of the wealthiest—and, by his disgusted estimation, most corrupt—families in Japan-occupied Korea. 

“Korea is very smallest country in the world,” he pronounces, as he lauds “the survival instinct of small people” who ”are always nomadic, involved in change.” 

“Most people don’t know that Hitler made the radio with no dials,” he insists, which certainly captures the metaphorical truth if not the literal one.

Also in German, referencing a Chinese aphorism: “It’s better to be the head of a dog than the rear end of a big ox.” It’s an expression with multiple variations: 寧為雞頭，不為鳳尾 (better to be a chicken’s head than a phoenix’s tail), or the original, from Western Han Dynasty 劉向 Liu Xiang’s 战国策, Strategies of the Warring States: 寧為雞口，無為牛後 (better to be a chicken’s mouth than a bull’s rear end).

Paik’s first worldwide live satellite broadcast, “Good Morning, Mr. Orwell,” aired on New Year’s Day 1984. The ambitious installation went completely off the rails, which didn’t bother Paik one bit. 

“That we failed here and there does not really matter, you know. That is more interesting.”

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Offering a karmic explanation for his failing health, a visibly frail Nam June Paik says: “The Buddha is punishing me for everything I did to it.”

Moon is the Oldest TV cuts to a rapid series of images to illustrate his point. A decapitated Buddha. A Buddha with a handset cradled to his ear, the coiled cord leading not to a rotary dial but a (now-vintage) personal computer. Another Buddha with a face that looks like a scribbled and scored lump of clay has a cigarette stuffed in its mouth. In the next scene, TV Buddha sits on a city sidewalk. Paik, who is occupying the same stretch of asphalt, repeatedly bonks another Buddha statue on the head with a violin. A violin on a leash, I might add, dragged by Paik along many a New York street like the most docile of dogs.

✂️
English-language Namuwiki, which seems, like Paik, to be prone to poetic license, presents a myth-worthy account of the artist’s death.

His last words were, “It's delicious, it’s delicious,” and it is said that he closed his eyes shortly after enjoying the eel rice bowl his wife made for him. As befits his usual eccentricity, the funeral was held amidst laughter and without any sad vibes. When the emcee told the story of him randomly cutting off the ties of audience members in his youth, all the mourners burst into laughter, and at the suggestion of replicating the same, all the participants cut off the ties they were carrying and placed them in his coffin, smiling as they bid farewell to him.

His remains were dispersed and interred in Korea, Germany, and the United States, where he mainly worked, and those in Korea are enshrined at Bongeunsa Temple. 

I was at Bongeunsa just three years ago for many a scrumptious vegetarian lunch hosted by the 18th Sakyadhita International Buddhist Women’s Conference. It was the biggest Sakyadhita yet: 3,000 participants from 31 countries. I had no idea Paik was right there with us.

🐒
“Monkeys Grasp for the Moon,” part of the 2001 exhibition Word Play: Contemporary Art by Xu Bing, hangs in the Sackler Gallery of the National Museum of Asian Art. The sculpture dangles from the atrium to the ground level, where it hovers above a reflecting pool. Twenty-one pieces of laminated wood spell out “monkey” in as many languages. The artwork recalls a cautionary folk tale about a group of monkeys who saw that the moon had fallen into a well and resolved to fish it out. They dangled from a branch and formed themselves into a simian chain to reach the water’s surface.

As told in the 1882 book Tibetan Tales, Derived from Indian Sources (“translated from the Kah-Gyur by F.A. von Schiefner, done into English from the German by W.R.S. Ralston”):

The water became troubled, the reflection of the moon disappeared, the branch broke, and all the monkeys fell into the well and were disagreeably damaged.

A deity uttered this verse: “When the foolish have a foolish leader, they all go to ruin, like the monkeys which wanted to draw the moon up from the well.”

The monkeys in another Buddhist parable (the Makkata Sutta) meet a more explicitly gruesome end after succumbing to a tar trap set by hunters. Have we evolved for the better? Here we are in the 21st century, unable to resist these broligarchy-set traps, paws sticky, sticky, stuck. 

But not Paik.

Trickster Nam June Paik is all the monkeys, philosopher Nam June Paik is the well, teacher Nam June Paik the branch, visionary Nam June Paik the moon. Artist Nam June Paik is the water, reflecting back our insights and delusions without discrimination, holding the moon without grasping it at all.

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