7 Chome-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo, Tokyo 113-8654, Japan
In 1956, Paik obtained a Bachelor of Arts in aesthetics from the University of Tokyo, where he also studied music and art history. There he also wrote his thesis on the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg.
Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, 80539 München, Germany
Nam June Paik studied at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich under the guidance of the composer Thrasybulus Georgiades for a year.
1953
Nam June Paik's passport photo.
1963
Nam June Paik demonstrates Listening to Music through the Mouth in Exposition of Music Electronic Television, 1963.
1963
Nam June Paik sitting on the stairs.
1963
Nam June Paik, Exposition of music - electronic television.
1963
Nam June Paik, Exposition of music - electronic television, Kuba TV.
1977
Nam June Paik with Buddha TV (1974) at MoMA.
1979
Nam June Paik, Nam June Paik Archive, Smithsonian American Art Museum.
1984
John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Nam June Paik, Merce Cunningham, at the time of the Good Morning, Mr Orwell collaboration, directed by Paik.
Nam June Paik creating his work.
Nam June Paik during the Exposition of Music.
Nam June Paik working.
Nam June Paik.
1974
New York, United States
Nam June Paik and his wife, artist Shigeko Kubota, are shown in his New York studio.
1953
Nam June Paik's passport photo.
1963
Nam June Paik demonstrates Listening to Music through the Mouth in Exposition of Music Electronic Television, 1963.
1963
Nam June Paik sitting on the stairs.
1963
Nam June Paik, Exposition of music - electronic television.
1963
Nam June Paik, Exposition of music - electronic television, Kuba TV.
1974
New York, United States
Nam June Paik and his wife, artist Shigeko Kubota, are shown in his New York studio.
1977
Nam June Paik with Buddha TV (1974) at MoMA.
1979
Nam June Paik, Nam June Paik Archive, Smithsonian American Art Museum.
1984
John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Nam June Paik, Merce Cunningham, at the time of the Good Morning, Mr Orwell collaboration, directed by Paik.
7 Chome-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo, Tokyo 113-8654, Japan
In 1956, Paik obtained a Bachelor of Arts in aesthetics from the University of Tokyo, where he also studied music and art history. There he also wrote his thesis on the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg.
Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, 80539 München, Germany
Nam June Paik studied at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich under the guidance of the composer Thrasybulus Georgiades for a year.
Nam June Paik creating his work.
Nam June Paik during the Exposition of Music.
Nam June Paik working.
Nam June Paik.
Paik was born in Seoul, South Korea, on July 20, 1932, into a bourgeois manufacturing family. He was the youngest of five siblings - Paik had two older brothers and two older sisters. His father was an owner of a major textile manufacturing firm.
Nam June Paik was trained as a classical pianist from a very young age. In 1950 at the beginning of the Korean War, Paik's family fled to Hong Kong, and later to Japan. They first arrived in the port city of Kobe and stayed at a Japanese inn for six months before they settled into a Western-style house.
His family home was a rather high-tech house for those days. This fact planted seeds for his lifelong interest in emerging technologies. In 1954, Paik's family bought a large Zenith TV. It was the first television in the neighborhood, and all their neighbours often came to watch it. Besides, their home was filled with records of many classical composers including Beethoven, as well as jazz and swing.
In 1956, Paik obtained a Bachelor of Arts in aesthetics from the University of Tokyo, where he also studied music and art history. There he also wrote his thesis on the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg. In 1957 he moved to West Germany, which was a center of new music and performance. While there, Nam June Paik studied at the University of Munich under the guidance of the composer Thrasybulus Georgiades for a year and then under the composer Woflgang Fortner at the International Music College in Freiburg for two years.
He attended the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt in 1957. There he met Karlheinz Stockhausen, and in 1958, when he met John Cage.
In the late 1950s, while working in West German Radio’s electronic music studio in Cologne, Paik met American avant-garde composer John Cage. His ingenious compositions and original ideas had a huge influence on Paik. He also became involved during this time with the group Fluxus.
In his work entitled Hommage à John Cage (1959), Nam June Paik used audiotape and performance to ruin traditional musical instrumentation and compositional practices, combining together piano playing, screaming, bits of classical music, as well as sound effects. Realizing that that was not enough, he decided to plunge into performance, first by introducing performative actions into his audio works. In 1962 the artist took part in the Fluxus International Festival of the New Music in Weisbaden.
Paik’s first exhibition, Exposition of Music/Electronic Television, was held in Wuppertal in 1963. It was the first time anyone had used video as an artistic medium and he eventually launched his transition from composer and performance artist to the inventor of a new art form. He used the material site of television as an instrument.
Nam June Paik moved to New York City in 1964 and started a prolific collaboration with cellist and performance artist Charlotte Moorman. The same year, he collaborated with Shuya Abe to make Robot K-456 (1964), a remote-controlled robot that played audiotaped speeches by John F. Kennedy. In 1967, Paik and a bare-breasted Moorman, playing Paik’s Cello Sonata No. 1 for Adults Only, were arrested for public indecency at the opening of his four-part Opéra Sextronique.
In the following years, the painter produced a number of videos, including Global Groove (1973), and produced video sculptures and installations. Among the most prominent were TV Buddha (1974), TV Garden (1974-1978), and Family of Robot (1986). Meanwhile, in 1979 Paik was appointed department chair at Staatliche Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf. This post he held until 1995.
In 1982 the Whitney Museum of American Art organized a large-scale retrospective exhibition of Nam June Paik’s works. Starting with his Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984), he created a number of groundbreaking live satellite-broadcast shows. They emphasized the need for communication between the East and the West through the exchange of art and culture. Family of Robot (1986) was the first of his robot sculptures made from vintage televisions as well as radios, and soon was followed by similar works, including Merce (1987) and Catherine the Great (1993).
Nam June Paik also developed large altars and architectural-scale installations of television monitors during the 1980s and 1990s. He created The More the Better (1988), 1,003 television sets playing videos of different artists on Korean subjects, for the Olympic Games held in Seoul. In 1996 the painter suffered a stroke, which had a dramatic impact on his career.
However, in the year 2000, Paik produced a millennium satellite broadcast entitled Tiger is Alive and in 2004 designed the installation of monitors and video projections Global Groove 2004 for the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin.
Nam June Paik was internationally recognized as the "Father of Video Art". His artworks and ideas were a major influence on late 20th-century art and continue to inspire a new generation of artists. He had an impact on such artists as Christian Marclay, Ryan Trecartin, Michael Bielický, Jon Kessler, Cory Arcangel, and Haroon Mirza.
He received a number of awards, including the Goslarer Kaiserring, 1991; the Picasso Medal, 1992; the Golden Lion, Venice Biennale, 1993; the Ho-Am Prize in the Arts, 1995; the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, 1998; the Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award from the International Sculpture Center and the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize, awarded by the City of Duisburg, both in 2001; the Edward MacDowell Medal in the Arts, 2004; the Order of Cultural Merit, 2007.
Paik has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including two major retrospectives, and has been featured in major international art exhibitions including Documenta, the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial.
Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, and the Reina Sofia National Museum in Madrid, among others.
Untitled
Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii
Ommah
Good Girl/Bad Girl
Beuys Vox
Li Tai Po
Pre-Bell-Man
Diamond Sat
I Ching 36
Radio Man
More Log in Less Logging
TV is New Heart
Robot
Evolution, Revolution, Resolution
Fractal Flasher
Fin de Siecle
Hydra-Budda
TV-Tulips
Tv Clock
Cage
In Memoriam George Maciunas
Golden View
Antique TV Fish
Buddha
Paik was a lifelong Buddhist.
Quotations: "I want to shape the TV screen canvas as precisely as Leonardo, as freely as Picasso, as colorfully as Renoir, as profoundly as Mondrian, as violently as Pollock, and as lyrically as Jasper Johns."
Nam June Paik never smoked or drank alcoholic beverages, as well as never drove a car.
Paik married Shigeko Kubota, a video artist, in 1977. His nephew, Ken Paik Hakuta, was an inventor and television personality, who was best known for creating the Wacky WallWalker toy, and who managed Nam June Paik's studio in New York. One of Paik's grandsons is Jinu, a South Korean singer, rapper, songwriter, and also a member of a hip-hop duo Jinusean.
