Bill Viola (b. 1951) is a pioneering figure in the field of video art whose work explores the spiritural and perceptual aspect of human experiences and is rooted in both Eastern and Western art as well as various spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. He has been employing video as a vehicle for self-realization to express the phenomena of sense perception.
Since the early 1970s Viola has created over 150 works including videotapes and multimedia installations that have been presented in numerous museums, galleries and broadcast on television around the world.
Bill Viola's work arouses a sense of awe with technical mastery of video combined with beautiful visual images. The audience becomes fixated on the screen and enveloped with the delicate and sensitive manner with which the artist conveys passing of time and changes in emotion.
The exhibition at the Kukje Gallery presents recent works produced in 2002 including Study fot the Path and Study for the Voyage that come directly out of the five-part digital fresco cycle project, Going Forth by Day in 2002. There is also The Veiling, one of the five installation works presented at the 46th Venice Biennale in 1995.
From 1974 to 1976. Bill Viola served as Technical Director at the Video Art Studio in Firenze, Italy. He also traveled widely throughout Bali, Solomon Island, Java, And Japan to study and record traditional performing arts. From 1980-1981. he was artist-in- residence at Sony Corporation's Atsugi research laboratories in Japan. In 1984. he was an artist-in-residence at the San Diego Zoo in California for a project on animal consciousness. He received honorary doctorate degrees from Syracuse University (1995), The Art Institute of Chicago(1997), and California Institute of the Arts(2000), and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000.
His major one-person exhibitions include Bill Viola: A 25-Year Survey, a 1997 retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Going Forth By Day, his most ambitious project to date commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin in 2002. His work can be currently viewed at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in an exhibition titled The Passions.