Nam June Paik

Korean-born artist

• Born: July 20, 1932
• Birthplace: Seoul, Korea
• Died: January 29, 2006
• Place of death: Miami, Florida

A musical composer who blended technology with numerous art forms, Paik is widely considered to be the first video artist. His work, reflecting his role as a major member of the Fluxus movement, challenged the seriousness traditionally associated with art.

Full name: Nam June Paik

Early Life

Born in Korea to a prosperous family, Nam June Paik took piano and composition lessons as a child. The Korean War forced his family to flee the country in 1950; they lived briefly in Hong Kong and then settled in Japan. At the University of Tokyo, Paik studied music and art history before earning a degree in aesthetics in 1956. He wrote his thesis on twentieth-century composer Arnold Schoenberg. Paik then moved to Germany to study music at the University of Munich and the Conservatory of Music in Freiburg. In Germany, he began experimenting with technology in his compositions, including using tape recorders as instruments. While in Darmstadt in the late 1950s, Paik met American composer John Cage, who became one of his biggest musical influences. Paik was inspired by Cage’s use of “found sounds” and silence in musical compositions.

Paik built on Cage’s ideas by creating musical sculptures that added the sounds of everyday objects, such as telephones and radios, to the sound of a piano. Paik presented his “Action Music” performances and musical sculptures at the WDR Studio für Elektronische Musik in Cologne, Germany, from 1958 to 1963. Paik did not set out with any concrete artistic objectives but instead worked from a few given conditions. Essentially, he made do with what he could obtain and present.

In the 1960s, Paik became closely associated with the Fluxus movement, an anarchic global coalition of artists founded by George Maciunas in 1961. The group aimed to challenge the seriousness and formal conventions of high art through performances, publications, manifestos, and music. Paik met Maciunas in 1961 and began to participate in Fluxus events throughout Europe. Reflecting Fluxus thought, Paik favored collages and found objects while deriding the view of artists as elite creators existing apart from the common folk.

Life’s Work

Although he was renowned among his peers in the art world, Paik struggled throughout his career to attain commercial success. He never developed a particular artistic style, in part because he had no financial imperative to remain stylistically consistent. Paik’s first solo exhibition in 1963, Exposition of Music–Electronic Television at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany, featured a video sculpture displaying a continuous image of abstract forms on a television set. The installation included pianos, noise machines, and other televisions transformed by altered electronics. Following the exhibition, Paik traveled to Japan to collaborate with electronics engineer Shuya Abe in the construction of Robot K-456, a remote-controlled robot made out of found parts that walked, talked, and defecated beans.

Paik moved to New York City in 1964 to work with other Fluxus artists. He collaborated with cellist Charlotte Moorman in a performance of John Cage’s 26’1.1499? for a String Player. During the performance, which took place at the Café a Go-Go in New York City in 1965, Moorman played a “cello” that was actually a half-dressed Paik. The piece questioned why serious music always had to be played by serious-looking people dressed in black.

Increasingly focused on television, Paik wanted to exploit the medium as though it were a musical instrument by retuning, altering circuits, and distorting the image with magnets, as in his 1965 piece Magnet TV. Paik, who is credited with coining the term superhighway as it relates to telecommunication, sought to overturn the passive, one-way flow of data typical of the electronic media in the 1970s and 1980s. He described his work as “time art” rather than sculpture.

Paik often laboriously transformed technological objects by hand to alter their appearance and purpose. He created the template for the video artists who followed him by abandoning narrative structure as well as video editing in such works as Video Fish (1975) and TV Garden (1982). For Time Is Triangular (1993), he created a blizzard of pulsating, morphing images shown on an array of monitors.

In 1996, Paik suffered a stroke that paralyzed the left side of his body and required him to use a wheelchair. He died on January 29, 2006, at the age of seventy-four. His work remains a part of public art collections all over the world, including the collections of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Significance

Never bound by convention, Paik explored the impact of technology on human existence through his art. His optimistic vision asserted the ascendancy of the human spirit over the machine. By creating new realms of experience and new forms of sound, he celebrated new opportunities for creative play and adventure. His artworks reflect a faith in the benign power of technology to enhance understanding and communication between cultures.

Bibliography

Decker-Phillips, Edith. Paik Video. Barrytown: Station Hill, 1998. Print.

Hanhardt, John G. Nam June Paik: Global Visionary. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Amer. Art Museum, 2012. Print.

Hanhardt, John G. The Worlds of Nam June Paik. New York: Guggenheim, 2003. Print.

Herzogenrath, Wulf, and Andreas Kreul, eds. Nam June Paik: There Is No Rewind Button for Life. Bremen: Kunsthalle Bremen, 2006. Print.

Kellein, Thomas, ed. Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video Space. New York: Abrams, 1993. Print.

Zurbrugg, Nicholas, ed. “Nam June Paik.” Art, Performance, Media. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004. Print.