NAM JUNE PAIK

Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist and a pioneer in Video Art who is often credited as the founder of this genre. He studied aesthetics at the University of Tokyo, earning his BA with a thesis on the work of composer Arnold Schoenberg before moving to Berlin to pursue further education. While in Germany, Paik would meet several influential figures, including John Cage, Wolf Vostell, Joseph Beuys, and George Maciunas. These early encounters would prompt him to join with the Fluxus movement in art initiated by Maciunas in 1962. He moved to New York in 1964, and the following year when Sony introduced the Portapak—the world’s first commercially released portable audio and video recording kit—Paik garnered international attention for his combinations of video, music, and performance along with a generation of artist who were now able to take up video as an accessible medium.

Paik’s most well-known work is arguably his TV Buddha from 1974, in which an 18th century Buddha statue which rests atop a pedestal stares into a television displaying a closed circuit image of itself being filmed by a camera behind the tv. He presaged the term “information superhighway” that was popularized in the 1990’s when he referred to an “electronic superhighway” in a 1974 proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation. His Awards include the UN’s Picasso Medal (1993) and the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (1992). Retrospectives of his work have been organized by Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Kunsthalle Basel, among others. His archives are housed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and many other works are held in the public collections of major institutions too numerous to list.