Nam June Paik Biography and Artwork

born Seoul (KOREA) 1932 died Miami, FL (USA) 2006

Paik Nam-june (July 20, 1932 - January 29, 2006) was a South Korean-born American artist, particularly noted for his video art.

Paik studied music history, art history, and philosophy at the University of Tokyo, where he graduated with a dissertation on Arnold Schoenberg. He went to Germany in 1956 to continue the study of music history at the University of Munich. In Germany he met composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, who inspired Paik to go into electronic art. Paik worked with Stockhausen in a studio for Electronic Music. He also became involved with the post neo-Dada art movement Fluxus, founded by George Maciunas. He was a frequent collaborator with cellist Charlotte Moorman.

He began working with modified television sets in 1963 and bought his first video camera in 1965, returning to Japan to conduct experiments with electromagnets and color television alongside electronic engineer Shuya Abe. With Abe he constructed his first video synthesizer while artist-in-residence at WGBH, the Boston public broadcaster. He was known for using rapid cuts and fast motion in his videos. He also claimed to have coined the term "information superhighway" in a paper written in 1974.

He will be remembered as a founding father of video art and will continue to influence the younger generation of artists. A space rock unit known as Paik is named in his honour.

"Art is just fraud. You just have to do something nobody else has done before", he famously declared during an interview with a Korean newspaper, and this has now become a popular quote.

He was left partially paralyzed after a stroke in 1996. He died on January 29, 2006, at his apartment in Miami, Florida, of natural causes. Paik is survived by his wife, video artist Shigeko Kubota.

Select Timeline

Select Exhibitions

• 1971 - Cineprobe, The Museum of Modern Art New York, NY
• 1971 - Videoshow, , Whitney Museum of American Art New York, NY
• 1980 - Nam Jun Paik, Whitney Museum of American Art New York, NY
• 1982 - 60'80 attitudes/concepts/images, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• 1992 - Pour la Suite du Monde, , Musee D'art Contemporain de Montreal Montreal, Canada
• 1993 - Feedback and Feedforth, The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan
• 1994 - The Howard Wise Gallery: TV as a Creative Medium, Whitney Museum of American Art New York, NY
• 1997 - Skulpture Projects in Munster, Westfalisches Landesmuseum Munster, Germany

Select Artwork

• Reclining Bronze Buddha, 1996
• Robot, 1990
• Before the Word There was Light, After the Word There will be Light, 1992
• NJP at 1800 RPMs, 1992
• Sonatine for Goldfish, 1992
• Human of a century, 1992
• Born Again, 1991

Quotes

• "Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life."
• "Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body's new membrane of existence."
• "I used the term (information superhighway) in a study I wrote for the Rockefeller Foundation in 1974. I thought: if you create a highway, then people are going to invent cars. That's dialectics. If you create electronic highways, something has to happen."

Publications

• The Worlds of Nam June Paik - by Nam June Paik, John G. Hanhardt, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; New Ed edition (July 2003)
• Paik Video (Station Hill Arts Series) - by Edith Decker-Phillips, Marie-Genvieve Iselin (Translator), Karin Koppensteiner (Translator), George Quasha, Station Hill Press (March 1998)
• Nam June Paik: Global Groove 2004 - by Nam June Paik, John G. Hanhardt, Caitlin Jones, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (July 15, 2004)

Quick Facts

• Nam June Paik was a South Korean-born American artist. He worked on several mediums of art but was often being credited for discovering and inventing the medium known as video art.
• As he was growing up, he was trained as a classical pianist.
• Nam June Paik then began participating in the Neo-Dada art movement, known as Fluxus.
• In 1964, Paik moved to New York, and began working with 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.
• 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.

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