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Nam June Paik (July 20, 1932 - January 29, 2006) was an American South-Korean born artist. He worked on several mediums of art but was often being credited for discovering and/or inventing the medium known as video art.

Born in Seoul, he had a father who worked as a textile manufacturer and four older brothers. As he was growing up, he was trained as a classical pianist. In 1950, Paik and his family had to flee from their home in Korea, due to the Korean War. His family first fled to Hong Kong, but later moved to Japan, for reasons unknown. Six years later, he graduated from the University of Tokyo, thus concluding his studies on both the Histories of Art, and the Histories on Music. He wrote a thesis on Arnold Schoenberg, an important music theorist and a teacher of composition.

That year, he moved to Germany, to study yet again, the History of Music at Munich University. While he was studying in Germany, Paik met three composers – Karlheinz Stockhausen, Joseph Beuys, and John Cage. After meeting them, Paik was inspired to go into electronic art. Paik worked with Stockhausen and Cage in a studio for electronic music.

Nam June Paik then began participating in the Neo-Dada art movement, known as Fluxus, which was inspried by the composer John Cage, and his use of everyday sounds and noises in his music. He made his big debut at an exhibition known as, “Exposition of Music-Electronic Television”, in which he scattered televisions everywhere, and used magnets to alter or disort their images.

In 1964, Paik move to New York, and began working with a classical cellist Charlotte Moorman, to combine his video, music, and performance. In the work “TV Cello”, the pair stacked televisions on top one another, so that they formed the shape of an actual cello. When Moorman drew his bow across the “cello”, images of both her playing, and images of other cellists playing appeared on the screens. In 1965, Sony introduced the Portapak, Paik's greatest weapon. With this, he could both move and record things, for it was the first portable video and audio recorder. From there, Paik became an international celebrity, known for his creative and entertaining works. A few are listed below.

In one very popular incident, Charlotte Moorman was arrested for going topless whilst performing in Paik’s “Opera Sextronique”, which occurred in 1967. Two years later, in 1969, they performed “TV Bra for Living Sculpture”, in which Charlotte wore a bra with small TV screens over her breasts.

In another one of Paik’s pieces, Something Pacific (1986), a statue of a sitting Buddha faces its image on a closed circuit television. (The piece is part of the Stuart Collection of public art at the University of California, San Diego.) Another piece, “Positive Egg”, displays a white egg on a black background. In a series of monitors, increasing in size, the image on the screen becomes larger and larger, until the egg itself becomes an abstract, unrecognizable shape. Paik was also known for making robots out of television sets. They were constructed using pieces of wire, and metal, but as time progressed, Paik used parts from radio and television sets.

Although Nam June Paik was famous all over the planet, he never once forgot about his home in South Korea, where he was raised. During the New Year's Day celebration in January 1, 1984, he aired "Good Morning, Mr. Orwell," a live link between WNET New York, Centre Pompidou Paris, and South Korea. With the participation of John Cage, Salvador Dali, Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Merce Cunningham, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, George Plimpton, and other art superstars, Paik showed that George Orwell's Big Brother hadn't arrived. In 1986, Paik created a piece called “Bye Bye Kipling”, a tape that mixed live events from Seoul, South Korea; Tokyo, Japan; and New York. Two years later, in 1988 he further showed his love for his home with a piece called “The more the better,” a giant tower made entirely of one thousand three monitors for the Olympic Games being held at Seoul.

In 1996, Nam June Paik had a stroke, which left him partially paralyzed. He died on January 29, 2006, in Miami, Florida, due to natural causes.

Works

  • "Media Shuttle: Moscow/New York" (1978) with Dimitri Devyatkin. At the beginning of this video, the artists ask, "What would happen if the people of New York and Moscow had a kind of citizen's band television, could see and talk with each other via satellite? The idea of a 'Media Shuttle' evoked this science fiction fantasy." Each artist contributed his take on his national media culture and the footage was blended into this video.

External links

Listening

1932 births | 2006 deaths | American artists

Contemporary artists | Video artists | Fluxus | Korean Americans | Korean artists | Video artists

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