Zen for TV

In a 1963 exhibition in Germany, Paik displayed a room full of electronically altered and arranged televisions, making him one of the first artists to use actual TVs and broadcast content to make art. One set arrived broken, compressing all received signals into a thin line of light. Paik embraced its broken state and titled it Zen for TV, playfully and profoundly linking its accidental minimalism to the meditative focus of Zen Buddhism, a religious reference he often used to signify an Asian perspective in Euro-American contexts. Zen for TV became one of Paik’s signature works, and over the years he created select versions like this one.