Seated adjacent to these works, a Southeast Asian Buddha (Golden Buddha, 2005) faces a television and a camera that, similar to TV Chair, broadcasts the Buddha’s own image onto the monitor. Its perpetual self-reflectivity feels particularly resonant considering the current popularity of sharing selfies and status updates on social media. In Standing Buddha with Outstretched Hand (2005), seen two galleries later, a standing Buddha faces a camera and a set of shelves containing four stacked televisions. The two middle monitors display the Buddha’s image, and the top and bottom monitors feature videos of abstracted, flickering flames that recall Candle TV. A simple artistic gesture complicates the reading of this work: the bottom two images are right-side up, while the top two images are upside-down. Unlike the Buddha’s body (i.e., the human figure), which is structured on bilateral symmetry, the pictures on the screens are organized on a horizontal axis, with the resulting spatial geometry between the Buddha and the TV unit becoming that of a cross. The hermetic symmetry, together with the serene visage of the Buddha and the eternal flames, convey a palpable feeling of centeredness.

Paik’s vision was humanistic, not dystopian; yet at times the exhibition feels oddly static due to the gallery’s use of large white columns and plinths, even as the space is closely monitored by guards. They separate Paik’s works from the active, physical space of the viewer, diminishing our visceral and empathetic connections with them in a way that seems inconsistent with Paik’s playful approach to art-making and his overarching interests in communication and the fusion of life and art. One instance concerns the four-foot-tall Bakelite Robot. For this sculpture, Paik assembled 11 radios made of colorful Bakelite, a plastic popularly used during the early 20th century, into a standing figure with open arms. Paik fitted LCD monitors into the empty cavities that once housed radio dials, at the figure’s mouth, hands, feet, elbows and hip-joint areas, thereby substituting moving video for actual movement. These details, and the near-human scale of the robot, beckon the viewer, but a broad pedestal impedes engagement with the work. In contrast to Bakelite Robot, the machines in Robot Drawings (1987), a series of childlike pencil and pastel works on paper, are performers. They are seen waving, emoting and interacting in an atmosphere dotted with music notes, pianos, planets, the moon, a dog—things that imply movement and sound. Many of them contain small seated Buddhas in their cores, sometimes connected by telephone cords.

Allusions to eternity and rebirth reappear in Chinese Memory, in the last gallery. This work includes a black cabinet television painted with grinning, bearded faces and abstracted television sets. The video footage seen here features a montage of Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, vignettes of old Chinese stereotypes such as hordes of bicyclists and troupes of daring acrobats, and American hippies and Ginsberg. Flanking the TV is a Maoist poster that reads, “Spring is eternal in our motherland,” and a Chinese scroll that features a vase of spring blossoms. A stack of Chinese history books rests on the floor. In his meditations on technology and global politics, Paik held a particular fascination with China. In 2005, the rapid growth of China’s economy dominated international news. It is, therefore, unsurprising that the subject of China would appear in Paik’s work from that year. With its overt geographical references, Chinese Memory also reads as a deliberate nod to the show’s Hong Kong audience.

Against the last wall of the gallery is 359 Canal Street (1991), which caps the exhibition as its grand finale. The installation includes a large wooden desk with open drawers containing objects and documentation from Paik’s history with the Fluxus art movement, as well as large cathode ray tubes from disassembled televisions spreading up the wall, across the floor and into the viewers’ space, like giant, searching eyes. The title derives from the New York City address established as the seat of Fluxus by its founding member and artist George Maciunas in the early 1960s. The title is painted in large letters on top of the desk, along with the names of Paik and his Fluxus collaborator Dick Higgins, beneath scattered wooden blocks from a Maciunas demolition. That 359 Canal Street was made 13 years after Maciunas’s death, which effectively ended Fluxus, is indicative of the elliptical and retrospective quality of time that frequently appears across Paik’s work.

The decision to close the exhibition with this work was a shrewd curatorial maneuver. 359 Canal Street is the most directly autobiographical of Paik’s pieces in the show, and it returns visitors to the core ideological tenets of the artist’s practice that developed during the 1960s—the decade that yielded TV Chair. In 359 Canal Street, pasted to the interior of its desk’s open door, a newspaper clipping from 1962 describes a so-called “Fluxfest,” or happening, in Wiesbaden, Germany, where Paik “covered himself with shaving foam, scattered rice and pebbles on the floor and into the audience and lamented over a roll of cheap paper.” The desk’s open drawers contain an envelope from artist Ray Johnson, a note from Yoko Ono and a poem titled “Time Piece, for George.” In poetic sparseness, this last artifact intimately and playfully speaks to Paik’s spirit by simultaneously embracing literalness and metaphor, and containing a last word that suitably ends the exhibition with a double entendre:

watch
this frog

plot
gravity jump

squat
rock to soggy

leafbed
and croak

“Nam June Paik: The Late Style” is on view at Gagosian Gallery, Hong Kong, until November 7, 2015.