Hyundai Motor brings four artists together in Yongin and São Paulo to reinterpret Nam June Paik's artistic legacy

Hyundai Motor announced Wednesday that the third installment of its Hyundai Translocal Series — titled "Hyundai Translocal Series: Ripples Across the Sky" — will open Thursday at the Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, running through March 28, 2027, before traveling to the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in Brazil from Nov. 28 through April 18, 2027.

The Hyundai Translocal Series is an art partnership program through which Hyundai Motor supports the full arc of collaboration between domestic and international arts institutions — from joint research and new commissions to exhibitions, public programs and publications — with the aim of examining contemporary themes through each region's distinct cultural context and generating new artistic discourse.

"Ripples Across the Sky" is the third collaborative exhibition in the series, following the inaugural partnership between the Cheongju Craft Biennale and the Whitworth last year, and the second collaboration between the Ulsan Art Museum and the New Museum, which opened this year. The latest edition was jointly organized by the Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in Brazil.

Curators and participating artists from both institutions visited each other's cities last year to explore local culture, history, language, art and the history of migration, deepening their joint research through a series of pre-exhibition forums.

The four participating artists — Kim Christine Sun, Viahjts, Jane Jin Kaisen and Vivian Caccuri — draw on the artistic practice of globally renowned artist Nam June Paik, who used art and technology to transcend the boundaries of time and space in search of new relationships and possibilities, reexamining what it means to connect.

Opening first at the Nam June Paik Art Center under the subtitle "Moon, Echo, Mosquito, and Meme," the exhibition brings together new commissions and existing works by the participating artists, foregrounding a multilayered dialogue among contemporary practitioners. Each artist presents new work that explores, in their own way, how different beings and worlds form relationships — offering varied perspectives on translocality.

The Pinacoteca de São Paulo exhibition, opening Nov. 28, will be subtitled "A Conversation with Nam June Paik" and is conceived so that the artists' new works enter into dialogue with key pieces by Paik himself.

Kim Christine Sun presents two large-scale mural works — "Mind Land Mass" (2026) and "Land Mind" (2026) — continuing her ongoing "Mind" series, with one work shown at the Nam June Paik Art Center and the other at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, conceived to resonate with each other across the two venues. The works depict two "minds" rendered as solid black masses pressing against each other, evoking the weight and tension of an encounter between different beings and the dynamism that physical contact can generate.

In "Three Origins of Samba: Jump, Bath, Prayer" (2026), Viahjts collaborates with Mozambican dancer and choreographer Sumbe Mussunja to trace the historical roots and etymology of samba — Brazil's defining musical genre and cultural expression. A second new work, "Language Is a Vaccine" (2026), examines the dual nature of language, showing how it can act as a force that transforms reality and opens new possibilities.

Jane Jin Kaisen places two works in dialogue: "Old Moon, New Moon" (2026), filmed at the Rundetaarn observatory in Copenhagen, faces a new aerial work, "Ocean Currents" (2026), which captures the volcanic rock formations, waves and vast seascape off the coast of Jeju Island. Together, the pairing reminds viewers that people living on opposite sides of the globe have long been connected through shared natural forces — the moon, ocean currents and tides.

Vivian Caccuri's sound sculpture installation "Clepsydra" (2026) — composed of red concrete speakers and cables draped like vines — fills the entire exhibition space with sounds recorded from the veins of multiple people, inviting visitors into a multisensory experience of the relationships among sound, the body, time and technology.

Park Nam-hee, director of the Nam June Paik Art Center, and Jochen Volz, director of the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, said in a joint statement: "This exhibition is a project of 'connection' that carries Paik's experiments into today's reality — a space of communication and solidarity that bridges different places and cultures and fosters understanding of the other, as well as a collaborative experiment built together by four curators and four artists. This exhibition, where Paik's skyways converge, makes his 20th anniversary all the more meaningful."

A Hyundai Motor spokesperson said the joint research between the Nam June Paik Art Center and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo was significant in that it uncovered artistic common ground across regional contexts, expanding from an exchange among four artists into a broader conversation that rereads Paik's artistic practice. "We hope to continue supporting this kind of research and collaboration — a process in which different perspectives connect and give rise to new interpretations and discourse," the spokesperson added.

Meanwhile, last month saw the opening of "Hyundai Commission: Tarek Atoui: Hold," the 11th exhibition in the long-term partnership between Hyundai Motor and Tate.

The Hyundai Commission is an annual exhibition series presented in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London, born out of the partnership Hyundai Motor and Tate have maintained since 2014.

The series has featured a different artist each year since Abraham Cruzvillegas inaugurated it in 2015. This year, Tarek Atoui participates as the 11th commissioned artist. The exhibition runs at Tate Modern through April 11, 2027.