On view
American and German, born Korea, 1932–2006
Waiting for UFO, 1992
Bronze, stone, plastic, and concrete (in three parts)
10 ft. 7 in. x 15 ft. x 20 ft. 2 in. (322.6 x 457.2 x 614.7 cm)
Gift of Cynthia Hazen Polsky, the Joseph H. Hazen Foundation, and the Ralph E. Ogden Foundation
© Nam June Paik Estate
Photo by Jerry L. Thompson
Nam June Paik’s Waiting for UFO is a three-part work installed in three locations on and near Storm King’s Museum Hill. Viewers discover the tripartite sculpture gradually as they traverse the property and encounter its distinctly sited elements. While the work features some of the components typical of Paik’s artificial interior landscapes—scattered televisions, castings of TV consoles, and representations of Buddhas—Waiting for UFO is one of very few outdoor sculptures the artist created. A commissioned gift to Storm King, the sculpture is sited according to the artist’s directions.
Paik was a visionary video and performance artist who became world-renowned for his pioneering experiments with technology. He began to incorporate televisions into his art in the early 1960s, exhibiting his earliest “electronic paintings”—television sets with scrambled images—in 1963. His interactive video works of the period presented the spectator with unprecedented visual experiences. In subsequent decades Paik became known for his installations comprising television sets filled with assorted objects or stacked video monitors displaying witty or dazzling abstract imagery. In Paik’s work television often represents a landscape of the contemporary United States, assuming a shrine-like role, as it does in modern society.
Installed outdoors, Waiting for UFO takes on additional significance, suggesting unanswerable questions about the relationship between technology and nature. Old, empty TV consoles, dropped haphazardly onto the ground, appear like ruins of a bygone technological era. Paik also included artificial flowers, bronze and stone Buddhas, and solemn bronze masks of his face staring blankly up toward the heavens. While Paik’s technological detritus appears to suggest that technology has overtaken nature, the television sets and seated figures are constantly at risk of being subsumed by the landscape, illustrating an ever-present tension between humanmade objects and the environment.
Paik was a visionary video and performance artist who became world-renowned for his pioneering experiments with technology. He began to incorporate televisions into his art in the early 1960s, exhibiting his earliest “electronic paintings”—television sets with scrambled images—in 1963. His interactive video works of the period presented the spectator with unprecedented visual experiences. In subsequent decades Paik became known for his installations comprising television sets filled with assorted objects or stacked video monitors displaying witty or dazzling abstract imagery. In Paik’s work television often represents a landscape of the contemporary United States, assuming a shrine-like role, as it does in modern society.
Installed outdoors, Waiting for UFO takes on additional significance, suggesting unanswerable questions about the relationship between technology and nature. Old, empty TV consoles, dropped haphazardly onto the ground, appear like ruins of a bygone technological era. Paik also included artificial flowers, bronze and stone Buddhas, and solemn bronze masks of his face staring blankly up toward the heavens. While Paik’s technological detritus appears to suggest that technology has overtaken nature, the television sets and seated figures are constantly at risk of being subsumed by the landscape, illustrating an ever-present tension between humanmade objects and the environment.