In 1965, pioneering video artist Nam June Paik made the bold statement that "just as the collage technic has replaced oil paint, the cathode ray tube will replace the canvas." Like any provocation, it has not aged well as the passage of time has whittled away at its importance.
Traditional canvases continue to offer pregnant possibilities for contemporary artists, and the history of oil paint continues forward — and back: Oil paint was recently freed from its supposed European origins when Yoko Taniguchi of the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties in Tokyo discovered works done in the medium in a mid-7th century Afghan cave mural.
Oil paint's existence across such an expanse of time should shed a rather harsh light on artistic preoccupations with new technologies. "Still/Motion: Liquid Crystal Painting," currently showing at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, till June 15, then at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, offers the opportunity to reflect upon video — the avant-garde medium since Paik's popularization of it — its curious debt to painting and whether it is destined for the scrap heap by-and-by.