Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik is a major contemporary artist and a seminal figure in video art. His video sculptures, installations, performances and tapes encompass one of the most influential and significant bodies of work in the medium. Paik has made an enormous contribution to the history and development of video as an art form. Exercising radical art-making strategies with irreverent humor, he deconstructs and demystifies language, content and technology of television. His iconoclastic works explore the juncture of art and popular culture.

Paik was born in Seoul, Korea in 1932 and died in 2006. He studied music and art history at the University of Tokyo, producing a thesis on Arnold Schöenberg, and graduated in 1956 with a degree in aesthetics.
Paikʼs studies continued in Germany at the Universities of Münich and Cologne, and at the Conservatory of Music in Freiburg. From 1958 to 1963, Paik worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen at the WDR Studio fur Elektronische Musik in Cologne.
After meeting Fluxus founder George Maciunas in 1961, he participated in numerous European Fluxus performances, actions and events. His European Fluxus performances, actions and events included “prepared” pianos and musical instruments, and later altered television sets. In Germany Paik collaborated with such artists as Wolf Vostell, Joseph Beuys and met avant-garde composer John Cage, whose ideas and art had a tremendous influence on his work. Paikʼs first one-man exhibition was 1963 Exposition of Electronic Television at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany.
In 1964, Paik came to New York, where his “discovery” of the Sony Portapak and video art has become one of videoʼs most enduring, if apocryphal, legends. His first one-person exhibition in New York was at the Bonino Gallery in 1966. In 1969, Paik participated in the landmark exhibition TV as a Creative Medium at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York. Paikʼs early works display the signature image manipulations and colorizations of the Paik/ Abe Synthesizer, a device he developed in 1969 with electronics engineer Shuya Abe. These experiments revolutionized the technological grammar of the medium. Paikʼs tapes often take form of the collaborations with tributes with avant-garde artists who were his friends and colleagues including
John Cage (A tribute to John Cage, 1973), Merce Cunningham (Merce by Merce Paik, 1978), Allen Ginsberg and Allan Kaprow (Allan ʻnʼ Allen's complaint, 1978) and Julien Beck (Living with Living Theatre, 1989).
In New York Paik began a longtime collaboration with the avant-garde cellist Charlotte Moorman, with who he produced series of important performance - based works. Among their most notorious pieces are the Opera Sextronique (1967), the TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969), and TV Cello (1971).

Paik is perhaps most widely recognized for his prodigious body of video installations and sculptures, from the landmark works of the 1970s, including TV Buddha (1974), TV Garden (1974-78) and Fish Flies on Sky (1975) to the 1986 Family of Robot and the 1995 Megatron.
In 1980s Paik produced live international satellite broadcasts including Good Morning Mr Orwell (1984) and Bye Bye Kipling (1986), which are global video installations that conjoin disparate spatial, contextual and temporal events.

Among numerous awards Paik won 1st Prize/ best pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennial for Artist as a nomad in the German Pavilion and in 1998 he was honored with prestigious Kyoto Award in Tokyo. He was named in 1999 among “Centuryʼs 25 Most Influential Artists” by ARTNews. Among numerous exhibitions his major retrospective exhibition The World of Nam June Paik at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, opened in 2000.