Explore Nam June Paik’s Notebooks

Back in 2012, SFMOMA made available three notebooks from the SFMOMA collection that Nam June Paik used in 1980, 1987, and 1996. Offering intimate access to the process of this renowned and prolific artist, the digitized notebooks foreground Paik's wide-ranging experimentation with drawing, a medium in which he developed a distinctive and playful pictorial vocabulary. His works on paper incorporate Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters as well as symbols of his own devising, including hieroglyphs of frequent subjects such as televisions, birds, and Buddhas.