SPACE March 2026 (No. 700)
Installation view of Stream or River, Flight or Pattern III (2016 – 2017) ©Lee Sowoon
Installation view of Empty Rooms (2025) ©Lee Sowoon
The 8th Nam June Paik Prize Exhibition, ‘Joan Jonas: The More-than-Human World’, has been on view at Nam June Paik Art Center since Nov. 20, 2025. Joan Jonas is a pioneering artist who has woven video, sound, and objects throughout performance art as their medium. This exhibition highlights how her body-based experiments have gradually shifted toward an ecological sensibility. Two works stood side by side at the entrance indicate the central theme of the exhibition. From the beginning of her career, Jonas has been attentive to natural forces and their interaction with the human body. While in her early work Wind (1968), she emphasised media experimentation and unpredictability captured by the performance on a beach, her work of fifty years later, Rivers to the Abyssal Plain (2021) depicts the rhythms of nature through gesture and drawing, evoking the cyclical flow from river to sea.
The exhibition is organised into three sections. The first section focuses on her pioneering works of the 1960s and 1970s, developed in response to the camera’s capacity to render movement in real time. In Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972), Jonas introduced an alter ego, Organic Honey, appearing in a mask to expose the gap between reality and its rendered image through the camera’s aperture. In the same year, in different work, Vertical Roll (1972), she fragmented representation of her own body with the vertical noise that cuts across the screen to produce visual misperception and to reclaim agency over the female body.
The second section turns to Jonas’s experiments from the 1980s onward, when she began to move beyond anthropocentric narratives and construct ecological ones. Traveling beyond New York, she gathered a wide range of inspiration, from literature and mythology to animals, landscapes, and traditional arts encountered in different countries. Stream or River, Flight or Pattern III (2016 – 2017) which may be understood as a culmination of these journeys, assembles landscapes, objects, and traces of animals into a multi-layered installation of video, drawing, and objects. Disparate memories of place and culture, including Venetian mosaics in Italy, a cemetery in Genova, a bird sanctuary in Singapore, and rituals and crafts in Vietnam are superimposed within a single frame. The ‘bird’ figures positioned at the centre of the work, weaves together images of nature and humanity, generating a fluid, interconnected narrative.
The third section is devoted to her recent work, which may be understood as the fruit of her experiments with repeated and evolving visual vocabulary. To Touch Sound (2024), a wooden sculpture with three projecting video screens creates an immersive audiovisual environment. Across three channels, images of marine life, performative drawings, recitation, and breath are interwoven to construct a holistic ecological narrative. Thematically, the work encapsulates the artist’s long-standing inquiries into the sea, life, and the coexistence of humans and earthothers. Formally, it exemplifies her distinctive strategy of adding different layers; performance, video, and objects to generate a multi-sensory experience.
Empty Rooms (2025) is a larger installation in which multiple media intersect. The juxtaposition of suspended lightweight sculptural elements and drawings of bare trees on the wall produces the sensation of an empty room where someone has vanished. Videos of shadows cast by young girls, accompanied by the sound of a piano, further intensify the atmosphere of absence. Through the image of the empty space, it recalls the cyclical rhythms of nature, where life fades and is renewed.
Overall, the exhibition traces the thematic and formal continuities between her ecological sensibility and her experiments in video performance throughout her career. The exhibition will be on show until Mar. 29.
