Nam June Paik Museum

Second Prize

In the summer of 2003, the Kyonggi Cultural Foundation held an international design competition for the future Nam June Paik Museum in Yong-In, Korea. The museum will both house the artist’s oeuvre and provide studio, workshop and performance space for his future work. Kyu Sung Woo Architects Inc. won second prize with its entry, “Experimental Boxes.”

Guiding Principles

Nam June Paik has consistently championed a joyful, playful, democratic, and optimistic approach to technology and the future. In his investigation of human qualities and values through the phenomenon of light and its various sources—from the television to the laser to the moon itself—he re-presents technology to us not as a warning or a promise but instead as an open possibility. These experimental boxes will provide a home and sanctuary for that vision, according to these principles:

1. To the extent that his work derives its strength from a clash between object and environment, the architecture of the museum must not attempt to emulate his art lest it make the gallery indistinguishable from the exhibition. On the contrary, the museum must serve as the mute box from which his art speaks.
2. Because the design of this museum will involve the artist himself, it is conceived as a museum/playground, a living context for media art rather than a finite historical archive. The galleries are modeled after black box theaters in order to provide maximum flexibility. Within the full armature of the museum a curator or artist is free to reprogram any space’lobby, gallery, hallway, rooftop or garden.
3. The building is embedded in the hillside in a manner that enhances the natural features of this characteristically Korean landscape and creates an arboreal backdrop for Nam June Paik’s work. Using the additive, terraced site strategy of traditional Korean architecture, the building follows the contours of the terrain and respects the presence of nature around it.

The museum is a single building but appears in the landscape as two platforms floating in the valley, with the ground continuing smoothly across its center. The sculpture garden to the Southeast is conceived of as a calm, open space within this thick evergreen hillside, bordered by a field of azaleas. A continuous infrastructural spine runs the length of the building, serving each of the galleries and tying them together as a cohesive whole. The thickness of the wall creates a transition threshold between the circulation routes and the galleries for both light and sound. Furthermore, video projectors and touch-screen panels can be installed along the circulation side of the infrastructural spine to supplement the exhibitions. This continuous surface can be used as additional exhibition space or as a way to provide educational material, such as contextual art historical information, footage of original performances and exhibitions, interactive and Internet-based exhibits, and telecasts from other museums.