Buddha Bap
Rice, wood, paint, video monitor, DVD player
95 x 41 x 35 in
241.3 x 104.1 x 88.9 cm
2012
Richard Humann • Buddha Bap • Rice, wood, paint, video monitor, DVD player • 95 x 41 x 35 in • 2012
Buddha Bap by Richard Humann pays homage to Nam June Paik, a pioneering figure in video art whose work explored the relationship between Eastern philosophy and Western technology. Having known Paik personally, visited his home and studio, and exhibited alongside him, Humann approaches this reinterpretation of Paik’s 1974 work TV Buddha with both artistic respect and personal familiarity.
In Paik’s original installation, a Buddha statue faces a television displaying its own live image, captured by a functioning video camera. The work creates a dialogue between Buddhist contemplation and electronic media, bringing an ancient spiritual tradition into contact with modern technology. The Buddha becomes both observer and observed, prompting reflection on perception, self-awareness, and the relationship between reality and its representation.
Humann reimagines this encounter by creating the Buddha entirely from cooked rice, known in Korean as bap. The rice Buddha faces a working television that displays a video of an Asian rice cooker preparing rice. The video camera is merely a prop, but the television functions, showing the process that produces the very material from which the Buddha is made. The Buddha is, in effect, watching its own creation.
The use of rice introduces an everyday Korean cultural element into Paik’s original conceptual framework. A staple of daily life becomes the substance of a sacred figure, connecting spiritual symbolism with the domestic ritual of preparing food. The work also brings Eastern religious traditions into conversation with Western electronic technology, questioning the boundaries between spirituality, material existence, and technological mediation.
Unlike Paik’s functioning video feedback system, Humann’s camera is a symbolic object rather than an active recording device. The working television and recorded image shift the focus from the Buddha observing its own reflection to contemplating the process that brings it into being.
Through humor and homage, Buddha Bap extends Paik’s exploration of contemplation and technology into a meditation on creation itself. The rice Buddha watches the transformation of its own essential material, bringing together the sacred and the everyday, the spiritual and the technological, in a playful reflection on the origins of existence.
Richard Humann • Buddha Bap • Rice, wood, paint, video monitor, DVD player • 95 x 41 x 35 in • 2012
Richard Humann • Buddha Bap • Rice, wood, paint, video monitor, DVD player • 95 x 41 x 35 in • 2012
Richard Humann • Buddha Bap • Rice, wood, paint, video monitor, DVD player • 95 x 41 x 35 in • 2012
Photo credits: Rizwan Mirza / Richard Humann Studio