Seong Eun Kim appointed Director

Nam June Paik Art Center (NJPAC) is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Seong Eun Kim as its new director. With her commitment to practice-based research on art museums, Kim will lead NJPAC in a museologically holistic way. Kim commented on her appointment: “NJPAC is an ever-evolving institution full of sparkling Paikian energy. I am thrilled to take this opportunity to build on its reputation as a museum dedicated to the artist and thinker Paik, and also as the only public museum specializing in media art in Korea. I will carry on the highly regarded projects that NJPAC has undertaken, with its fantastic team, and at the same time will launch a few new initiatives to unlock its untapped potential.”

Having obtained a D.Phil. in anthropology from the University of Oxford in 2009 for her thesis on contemporary artists’ interventions in museums, Kim worked at NJPAC from 2011 to 2014, and afterwards at Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art until 2019. In her previous roles she organized, among others, exhibitions Common Front, Affectively (NJPAC, 2018), exhibition-related programs in conjunction with solo shows of such artists as Olafur Eliasson and Haegue Yang (Leeum, 2015–17), and the public program series Intermedia Theater (Leeum, 2015–16). Kim was in charge of the symposium series Gift of Nam June Paik and the journal NJP Reader (NJPAC, 2011–14). Her recent publications include “A Critical Muscle, a Choreographic Terrain” (The Curatorial in Parallax, MMCA, 2018), and “Cybernetic Lyricism: Gregory Bateson, Nam June Paik and the ‘Mind’ as Conjunctive” (NJP Reader #7, 2017).

As NJPAC’s new director, Kim plans to concentrate on: programming to facilitate art historical and transdisciplinary research on Paik and media art and to interrelate it to overall museum practices; exhibition experiments in terms of connecting the curatorial to the idea of commons and thus transforming the museum as a place for public assembly; local and international collaboration with museums, universities and companies on artist commissions, exhibitions, symposiums, and publications; digital platform design to make NJPAC’s contents more accessible online; and audience development, particularly those in the field of technological industries. Under her new leadership, NJPAC will perform its mission more solidly to serve as a museum where Paik lives on, and where art, technology, and life can converge and merge.

Kim has assumed her role at NJPAC in late September 2019.

About Nam June Paik Art Center
Following the agreement between Nam June Paik himself and the provincial government of Gyeonggi-do, Korea, NJPAC was opened to the public in 2008. It houses collections, primarily of Paik’s artworks but not without works of other artists, and archives including Paik’s video materials. NJPAC stages six to seven exhibitions a year, and experimental performances in the Fluxus tradition, all accompanied by extensive educational activities. It is also an important task for NJPAC to support both emerging and established artists through such a scheme as Nam June Paik Art Center Prize awarded every two years. Other core programs of NJPAC include a symposium, an oral history project, and the publication of a scholarly journal, exhibition catalogs, and research monographs.