Nam June Paik: Video Works 1963–88

In 1988 the Hayward Gallery staged Britain’s first full-scale presentation of video art by the Korean-born artist Nam June Paik. A pioneer of video art, Paik first began modifying TV sets in 1963. In 1965, he was one of the very first artists to produce work on a portable video-recorder. The exhibition, which was organised by the Arts Council’s Gerlinde Gabriel and designed by the architects Stanton Williams, ran concurrently with both The Tiger Rugs of Tibet and Eisenstein at Ninety. 

Paik’s solo exhibition at the Hayward Gallery wasn’t a retrospective. Instead, it focussed on the artist’s video sculptures and video-tapes. The main focus of the exhibition was Paik’s Family of Robots (1986): a series of mechanical sculptures constructed from vintage TV sets. The exhibition at the Hayward Gallery was the last time that this ‘family’ was shown together, before they were separated in order to enter a public and private collections.