Tom Haar, Shigeko Kubota and Name June Paik, 1974 ©Tom Haar

By Midori Yoshimoto, Ph. D.

 

Associate Professor of art history and gallery director at New Jersey City University

 

Wednesday, September 26, 2018, at 6:30 – 8:00 PM

Korean Cultural Center New York

460 Park Avenue, Floor 6, New York, NY 10022 

Free admission; refreshments provided     

 

 

 

In Germany, in 1962, South-Korean born composer/artist, Nam June Paik gained notoriety by breaking the violin and cutting the necktie of the American composer John Cage. The Japanese sculptor Shigeko Kubota, who was part of the Tokyo avant-garde art scene, heard the news about the eccentric Korean artist and dreamt of meeting him someday. The following year, this dream came true when Paik came to Japan and held a concert at the Sogetsu Art Center. The two artists met for the first time and became active in the same Tokyo art circle. The rest is history.

Paik and Kubota both moved to New York in 1964, and now became part of the community of Fluxus – a group of multi-disciplinary artists engaged in performance art. By the late 1960s, they had transitioned to video art and became pioneers of the new medium. Although they did not marry until the late 1970s, they were together, encouraging each other’s artistic experiments until Nam June’s death in 2006. Kubota outlived him by almost a decade, making tributes to her beloved partner through various video works and through a written memoir.

Although Paik became well known as the father of video art, Kubota has remained in relative obscurity. This talk will illuminate the originality of these two unique artists and the crisscrossing of their dynamic lives, and will also discuss how they supported and influenced each other creatively.

 

Midori Yoshimoto, Ph.D. is associate professor of art history and gallery director at New Jersey City University with an extensive curatorial background. While earning her Ph.D. at Rutgers University between 1996 and 2002, she served as Assistant Curator at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, realizing several exhibitions, which traveled to Japan. As an independent curator, she has organized Do-It-Yourself Fluxus (Art Interactive, Cambridge, MA, 2003) and New Tale of Our Age, (The Visual Art Center of New Jersey, Summit, 2009). Yoshimoto has also served as a lecturer at the Museum of Modern Art, New York since 2004.

 

 

AHL Foundation Public Lecture Series 2018
In Collaboration with Korean Cultural Center New York

 

AHL Foundation and Korean Cultural Center New York’s collaborative Public Lecture Series aims to provide the general public, as well as the Korean American community, with the opportunity to learn diverse theoretical perspectives on issues related to Korean art and culture and to reflect further on future interactions between Korean art and various worldwide global communities.

 

Organized by the AHL Foundation in collaboration with the Korean Cultural Center New York