THE STREET
photography, 100x150cm
2013
The work addresses problems with conservation of new media artworks. The collection of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul features Nam June Paik’s work The More, The Better. It is a gigantic tower built of 250 kinescope TV sets, which for some time has constantly required repairs. Given the lack of methods of solving such problems, the Museum convened a conference devoted to conservation of new media art, discussed on the example of The More, The Better. According to the post-conference publication, one of the considered solutions involved dismantling the sculpture and burying it deep in the museum storage. The Street shows a fictitious situation of transporting a fragment of Nam June Paik’s piece out of the Museum. The protagonist of the photograph is a man drawing a cart full of broken TV sets. The scene brings to mind Korean streets, where similar carts are used for collecting waste paper. Other characters have been inspired by Korean works of art, such as Kim Hong-do’s Listening on Horseback to a Nightingale Singing and Kim Ku-Lim’s film The meaning of 1/24 seconds.