Harvard showcase for video-art pioneer Nam June Paik
He was a musician by training whose conceptual art frequently blended the aural and the visual into the quirky and quixotic. Credited with coining the term “electronic superhighway,” he was famous for mixing sculpture and performance with a relatively new invention called television, which in time would define his creative output. Seoul-born Nam June Paik, known as the father of video art, was also a relative of Ken Hakuta, M.B.A. ’77, who has gifted a number of his uncle’s pieces to the Harvard Art Museums in recent years. Those works are the focus of “Nam June Paik: Screen Play,” on view through Aug. 5. “Paik was a really important player in artistic developments over the 20th century,” said Mary Schneider Enriquez, Houghton Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, who helped curate the show. The artist’s effort to engage viewers with his work was “revolutionary,” Enriquez added, as was his “electronic way...