Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik (born July 20, 1932, Seoul, Korea [now South Korea]—died Jan. 29, 2006, Miami Beach, Fla., U.S.) was a Korean-born composer, performer, and artist who was from the early 1960s one of postmodern art’s most provocative and innovative figures.

Paik studied art and music history at the University of Tokyo before moving to West Germany, where he continued his studies (1956–58) at the University of Munich. In the late 1950s, while working in West German Radio’s electronic music studio in Cologne, Paik met American avant-garde composer John Cage, whose inventive compositions and unorthodox ideas had a major influence on the budding artist. He also became involved during this time with the group Fluxus.

Paik’s exhibition “Exposition of Music/Electronic Television,” held in Wuppertal, W.Ger., in 1963, marked the first time anyone had used video as an artistic medium. The next year Paik moved to New York City and began a fruitful collaboration with cellist and performance artist Charlotte Moorman. In a well-publicized incident 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 Paik made a number of videos, including Global Groove (1973), and produced video sculptures and installations. Among the most notable of these were TV Buddha (1974), TV Garden (1974–78), and Family of Robot (1986). In 1982 the Whitney Museum of American Art held a large-scale retrospective of Paik’s work. Starting with Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984), he produced a number of groundbreaking live satellite-broadcast shows that among other things emphasized the need for communication between the East and the West through the exchange of art and culture. He created The More the Better (1988), 1,003 television sets playing videos from a variety of artists on Korean subjects, for the Olympic Games held in Seoul. In 1996 he suffered a stroke. Paik’s video opera performance Coyote 3 (1997), at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, featured a disconcerting mixture of multiple television screens, laser lights, and smoke. From the late 1970s Paik had divided his time between the United States and Germany, where he taught at the Düsseldorf State Academy of Art.