Nam June Paik

Life

He was born on July 20, 1932, in Keijo (present-day Seoul) under Japanese rule. In 1950 the family fled the Korean War to Hong Kong and later moved to Japan. In 1956 he graduated from the Department of Aesthetics and Art History in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Tokyo; his graduation thesis was a study of Arnold Schoenberg. The same year he went to Germany, where he studied music history at the University of Munich and composition at the Freiburg Hochschule für Musik.

During the period he was based in Cologne he met John Cage and was greatly influenced by him. In 1961 he met George Maciunas and joined Fluxus. He died on January 29, 2006, in Miami, Florida, in the United States.

Founding video art

In 1963, at Wuppertal in Germany, he held the solo exhibition "Exposition of Music – Electronic Television," in which he lined up 13 television sets whose images were distorted with magnets and the like or inverted from black to white. This is regarded as the world's first video art exhibition. After he obtained Sony's portable video equipment, the Portapak, in 1965, he developed video installations and performances in earnest.

Major works

• TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969) and TV Cello (1971) — collaborations with the cellist Charlotte Moorman
• TV Buddha (1974) — a work in which a Buddha statue keeps gazing at its own image, captured by a closed-circuit camera, on a television
• The More, the Better (1988) — a large work in which 1,003 monitors are stacked into a tower

In 1974 he used the phrase "electronic super highway" to refer to the communications networks of the future, and is said to have foreseen the later internet.

Awards

He received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and the Kyoto Prize (Arts and Philosophy) in 1998.