Joan Jonas’ “Empty Rooms” (2025), unveiled as a part of the American artist’s first museum solo exhibition in Korea, “The Extra-than-Human World,” on the Nam June Paik Artwork Middle in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province / Korea Occasions photograph by Park Han-sol
Now 89, American artist Joan Jonas has watched extra mates — people and animals — depart than she will be able to bear to rely.
“It occurred to me a few 12 months in the past that every particular person leaves an empty room once they depart my life,” she mentioned.
This 12 months, Jonas gathered the quiet weight of these losses — the companions gone, the reminiscences fading — and laid them naked in a single room.
“Empty Rooms,” her newest set up, was unveiled on the Nam June Paik Artwork Middle in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province. It options photographs of naked bushes and drifting paper, intertwined underneath bands of sunshine and shadow.
Cream-colored paper sculptures cling within the air, glowing from inside, whereas a doghouse sits on the ground. One wall is crowded with dozens of drawings of a leafless tree. A video loops close by, pairing shadow play with jazz piano compositions by the artist’s longtime collaborator, Jason Moran.
The set up, which weaves collectively the visible languages of sculpture, drawing and video that Jonas has explored for the reason that Sixties, serves as a becoming centerpiece for “The Extra-than-Human World,” her first museum present in Korea.
Set up view of Joan Jonas’ “The Extra-than-Human World” on the Nam June Paik Artwork Middle / Korea Occasions photograph by Park Han-sol
The present follows her latest recognition because the recipient of the Nam June Paik Prize. Based in 2009, the biennial award initially targeted on mid-career artists recognized for his or her experimental spirit. After a complete restructuring, the prize was relaunched in 2024 with a brand new function: to honor up to date artists whose work pushes the boundaries of media experimentation and advances themes of peace and mutual understanding. Jonas grew to become the primary laureate of the reimagined prize.
“Jonas’ observe reveals the potential of a world past human exceptionalism, the place people and nonhumans coexist and the values of interdependence come to the fore,” mentioned Park Nam-hee, director of the Nam June Paik Artwork Middle, explaining the jury’s resolution.
The award additionally marks an surprising “reunion” between Jonas and Paik, two pioneers whose experiments helped outline Twentieth-century video artwork and who have been as soon as literal neighbors in New York, shut sufficient to see into one another’s home windows.
A nonetheless from Joan Jonas’ “Wind” (1968) / Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone
The 41 works on view at “The Extra-than-Human World” hint the arc of her artistic life: from early video and efficiency items made with moveable cameras to the observe she developed from the Nineteen Eighties onward, probing past people to incorporate nonhuman entities.
The 1968 “Wind,” a silent movie shot one winter on the seashores of Lengthy Island, let fierce coastal gusts dictate the performers’ actions. In doing so, the artist forged nature not as a mere backdrop however as an lively protagonist, a pressure collaborating within the efficiency.
A nonetheless from Joan Jonas’ “Natural Honey’s Visible Telepathy” (1972) / Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone
In 1970, throughout a visit to Japan, Jonas bought a conveyable video digicam. The flexibility to see photographs as they have been being captured was nothing wanting revelatory. In “Natural Honey’s Visible Telepathy,” she shifts between herself and her avatar, “Natural Honey,” revealing the slippage between actuality and its mediated double by way of the digicam’s gaze. Her persistent presence in her personal performances aligned with the rise of the feminist motion within the U.S., a second the place mass media portrayals of the feminine physique have been coming underneath growing scrutiny.
Joan Jonas’ “Lovely Canine” (2014) / Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone
By the late Nineteen Eighties, she started directing her consideration towards the more-than-human world.
“Lovely Canine” facilities on her personal canine, Ozu. She hooked up a tiny digicam to his neck so the footage would replicate his actions and views as he wandered by way of the Canadian panorama. The ensuing video is flipped the other way up, at occasions shaking with the rhythm of his breath. By having Ozu as each performer and co-creator, Jonas dissolves the boundary between species.
“The Extra-than-Human World” runs by way of March 29, 2026.
