Research B4 (1)

Nam June Paik

 

20 Facts about the artist’s life

  1. He was born on July 20, 1932 in Seoul, South Korea. He was the fifth son of a wealthy businessman. He had two sisters and two brothers. (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0656760/bio) Different from other families in Korea who were under control of Japanese, “he was trained as a classical pianist from a very young age.” His family was really interested in music. His house was filled with records of many classical composers, such as Beethoven, and jazz and swing. He learned from his home environment that even if he never listen to music or read books, it is worth to buy all the records and books. (https://www.theartstory.org/artist-paik-nam-june-life-and-legacy.htm)
  2. “His father was later rumored to be a Chinilpa, or Japanese sympathizer, whose successful business also contributed greatly to the economic capital of the time.” (https://www.theartstory.org/artist-paik-nam-june-life-and-legacy.htm) In 1950, because of his father’s rumor, his family had to flee from the Korean War, first to Hong Kong, and later to Japan. (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0656760/bio)
  3. “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, a rarity in those days. The house was in the seaside town of Kamakura, home of the famous Great Buddha statue that Paik often visited and which possibly inspired some of his later works, such as TV Buddha (1974).” (https://www.theartstory.org/artist-paik-nam-june-life-and-legacy.htm)
  4. His family was close to technology, which was rare at the time. This might have affected his interest in technologies throughout his life. In 1954, his family bought Zenith TV that appeared for the first time in their town. (https://www.theartstory.org/artist-paik-nam-june-life-and-legacy.htm)
  5. “In 1956, spurred by his hunger for this new visual medium, Paik got a Bell and Howell eight-millimeter movie camera, enabling his first amateur attempts at filmmaking.” (https://www.theartstory.org/artist-paik-nam-june-life-and-legacy.htm) In the same year, he graduated from the University of Tokyo, receiving a BA aesthetics. (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0656760/bio) “He also studied music and art history and wrote his thesis on the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg” (https://www.theartstory.org/artist-paik-nam-june-life-and-legacy.htm)
  6. After his graduation, in 1957, he left to west Germany to pursue his study of avant-garde music and performance art. (https://americanart.si.edu/artist/nam-june-paik-3670) “While there, he studied with composer Thrasybulus Georgiades at the University of Munich for a year and then with composer Woflgang Fortner at the International Music College in Freiburg for two years.” “In Germany, Paik met artists Joseph Beuys and John Cage, whose cutting-edge avant-garde actions and performances would be influential in diverting the course of his artistic career. Inspired by Cage’s use of everyday sounds and noises in his music, Paik would adopt similar techniques in his own work.” (https://www.theartstory.org/artist-paik-nam-june-life-and-legacy.htm) For the first time in his life, he collaborated with Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage to create electronic arts. (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0656760/bio)
  7. Soon after, in Germany, he joined the Fluxus movement, which was also known as the Neo-Dada art movement. Fluxus was an international artistic movement formed in the early 1960s that included artists, composers, designers, and poets known to engage in experimental art performances with different artistic media and disciplines. Also, their value emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. “In 1962 he participated in the Fluxus International Festival of New Music in Wiesbaden – the first Fluxus event organized by George Maciunas.” (https://americanart.si.edu/artist/nam-june-paik-3670) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxus)
  8. He experimented various kinds of performances with audio works, such as Hommage à John Cage (1959) and Simple, Zen for Head and Étude Platonique No. 3 (1961). (https://www.theartstory.org/artist-paik-nam-june-life-and-legacy.htm)
  9. In 1963, he held a solo show titled “Exposition of Music-Electronic Television” at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany. “It presented his work of television sets, which gave a totally new perspective of the look and content of television.” (https://americanart.si.edu/artist/nam-june-paik-3670) “This marked the beginning of his transition to inventor of a new art form, which utilized Fluxus philosophies and also introduced television as a viable instrument. In the exhibition, thirteen televisions, representing individual pieces, lay on their backs and sides with their screen images altered. For example, Zen for TV (1963) reduced the television picture to a horizontal line while Kuba TV (1963) shrank and expanded the image on the television set according to the changing volume.” “The exhibition was also remembered for Joseph Beuys’s participation, after he took an ax and smashed Paik’s installed pianos into pieces.” “The camaraderie Paik made in Germany with Beuys, Cage, George Maciunas, and cellist Charlotte Moorman supported his metamorphosis from musician, composer, and performer to a multimedia artist.” (https://www.theartstory.org/artist-paik-nam-june-life-and-legacy.htm)
  10. In 1963, he briefly returned to Tokyo, Japan. “The Sony Port-a-Pak was the first commercially available portable videotape recorder, and Paik started an avid experimentation with it. In Tokyo, he worked with the television technician and electronics engineer Shuya Abe, a crucial assistant in helping Paik realize his projects. Together, Paik and Abe constructed Robot K-456 (1964), Paik’s first automated robot. The piece was shown in a series of performance-based projects in New York City and Germany through the end of the 1960s.” (https://www.theartstory.org/artist-paik-nam-june-life-and-legacy.htm) “He was also revolutionary because he claimed robotics as a viable medium for use in multimedia art, triumphantly declaring the potential for artistic innovation through technological means. ” (https://www.theartstory.org/artist-paik-nam-june-artworks.htm)
  11. In 1964, he moved permanently to New York City, the United States, and continued his career. “The television, entertainment, and communications industries, where his lifelong interest lay, were centered in Manhattan as well. Famously, it was in New York in 1965 where the first piece of so-called “video art” was created when Paik claimed his video footage of the Pope’s visit to be a serious artwork. The footage was shown, later on the day of its capturing, at a screening at the Café A Go Go in Greenwich Village. Albeit grainy, it proved a revolutionary new way to consider art.” “In New York, Paik expanded his engagement with video and television, and exhibited his work at the New School, Galerie Bonino, and the Howard Wise Gallery.” (https://www.theartstory.org/artist-paik-nam-june-artworks.htm) In 1965, he first used video camcorder in art. (Ex) Magnet TV (1965)) (https://americanart.si.edu/artist/nam-june-paik-3670)
  12. “Collaborating with cellist Charlotte Moorman, he created one of his most influential works, TV Cello(1971), a performance piece which transformed a stack of televisions into a musical instrument.” (http://www.artnet.com/artists/nam-june-paik/) “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.” (TV cello (1976)) (http://www.all-art.org/Architecture/24-22.htm) “Two years later, in 1969, they performed TV Bra for Living Sculpture, in which Moorman wore a bra with small TV screens over her breasts.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nam_June_Paik#Exhibitions)
  13. In 1969, he collaborated with the Japanese engineer Shuya Abe and created a video synthesizer, which made him able to alter images and videos from different sources. With this Paik-Abe video synthesizer, Paik produced a new artistic medium with television and video. He used this medium in different forms, such as videotape, sculptures, and television productions. (https://americanart.si.edu/artist/nam-june-paik-3670) “When Paik exhibited the Synthesizer at Galeria Bonino in New York, he encouraged visitors to use it, to perform in front of the camera, and to play with their own footage, thus becoming participants and directors themselves. The interactive aspect of the synthesizer corresponded to Paik’s longstanding philosophy in favor of the democratic and egalitarian sharing of technology through art. The synthesizer was also applied in his later seminal works including Global Groove (1973), Guadalcanal Requiem (1977), and Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984).” (https://www.theartstory.org/artist-paik-nam-june-artworks.htm)
  14. In New York, he met Japanese-born woman named Shigeko Kubota who was the video artist as well. In 1977, they got married. “Her influence on Paik, in terms of the exploration of the aesthetic, technological, emotive, and even organic potential of video art, merits further study.” (https://www.theartstory.org/artist-paik-nam-june-artworks.htm)
  15. “In the 1970s, Paik continued experimenting with television and video. His philosophical TV Buddha series, first executed in 1974, playfully expressed the paradoxical relationship between technology and human spirituality, which had been under constant debate since the modern age. In these pieces, he commonly placed real life Buddha statues in front of screens on which other Buddhas were shown – spurring viewers to join in the consideration of these two very different yet parallel aspects of humanity.” (https://www.theartstory.org/artist-paik-nam-june-artworks.htm) He further created different versions of TV Buddha using different statues.
  16. “In the early 1980s, Paik returned to his earlier interest in cybernetics and robotic art, and created his first series of video sculptures, which epitomized the humanization of technology. One of Paik’s rare talents was that he seemed to always be one step ahead in predicting through his artwork the role that rapidly progressing technologies would have within society.” (Ex) Family of Robot (1986)) (https://www.theartstory.org/artist-paik-nam-june-artworks.htm)
  17. His largest project was “Wrap around the World” designed for the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, Korea. (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0656760/bio) He mounted The More the Better, a giant tower made entirely of 1003 monitors as part of his project for the 1988 Olympic Games.
  18. From 1979 to 1996, he was professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nam_June_Paik#Exhibitions)
  19. “He was a lifelong Buddhist who never smoked or drank alcoholic beverages, and never drove a car.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nam_June_Paik#Exhibitions)
  20. In 1996, he had a serious stroke that limited his physical mobility. His left side was paralyzed, causing him to use a wheelchair for the last decade of his life (but, he was able to walk with assistance). Before stroke, he travelled around the world and found sites to get inspired for his projects. However, after he had a stroke, his style changed to “a more self-reflective process in which he chose new forms of artistic expression reflecting his thoughts on global politics.” (Ex) Chinese Memory (2005)) “The aging artist developed much of his late work in dialogue with his studio assistant, Jon Huffman, who remained at his side.” “Ken Hakuta, Paik’s nephew, who visited and lived with him in Manhattan in the 1960s, came back after Paik’s stroke to bring the artist’s home into financial order and to create a secure and sustaining living environment for his final years.” He died January 29, 2006, in Miami, Florida due to complications from his stroke. At the time of his death, he was survived by his wife and his brother, Ken Paik, and his nephew, Ken Paik Hakuta.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nam_June_Paik#Exhibitions) (https://www.theartstory.org/artist-paik-nam-june-life-and-legacy.htm)

 

Artist’s inspirations, style, materials

  • “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,” he declared in his 1969 manifesto. (http://www.artnet.com/artists/nam-june-paik/)
  • “he always seemed to be geographically unfixed and culturally unaligned, an existential floater who made some of his most interesting art from pixels and sound waves bounced off satellites circling in space.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/05/arts/design/nam-june-paiks-work-at-asia-society.html)
  • He used wires, metals, and parts from television and radio sets to make robots.
  • He combined his interests in music, art and electronics to create a new form in art; video art.
  • He looked for new, imaginative and humanistic ways of using the technologies developed during the 20th century. (http://www.artnet.com/artists/nam-june-paik/)
  • “His early video work was more literal in its approach, using television monitors and video to create sculptures and installations to express his ideas about nature, technology, and the arts.” (http://www.ndoylefineart.com/paik.html)
  • “During the 1970’s and 1980’s, he continued to develop and refine his work, reflecting the new global consciousness with live multimedia satellite broadcasts and increasingly sophisticated technology and expression. He also taught and became a social activist during this time. With symbols of ancient Greece (Icarus) and modern culture (New York City), east (traditional Korean rituals) and west (Rodin’s Thinker), nature (birds) and technology (his satellite performance Good Morning Mr. Orwell), his work became less literal in its presentation, and sonorously poetic in its iconography and subtle blending of technologies.” (http://www.ndoylefineart.com/paik.html)
  • “Piano Piece of 1993, is an homage to his friend and mentor John Cage, who died in 1992. It consists of a piano piled high with monitors displaying images, including Cage, and various audio and visual equipment. A computer program by Richard Titlebaum plays music by Cage on the piano, and Paik’s hands and feet are shown in several of the monitors as he plays, as well as choreographer and friend Merce Cunningham. Paik developed inventive visual effects, which are displayed on the monitors, creating a dynamic and coordinated visual presentation.” (http://www.ndoylefineart.com/paik.html)
  • “Megatron/Metrix of 1995 was a billboard-sized installation piece on exhibit in the National Museum of American Art, which contained scenes of traditional Korean rituals and footage of David Bowie in concert, with both live video and computer-generated animation. A large bird flies on one large screen, alternated with giant flags from participating nations.” (http://www.ndoylefineart.com/paik.html)
  • “His work has included global television projects, artistic videotapes, installations, performances, sculptures, and films, combining visual art and sound. His music compositions had been based on mathematics, and he transferred this method of composing to visual art from the influence of Dada.” (http://www.ndoylefineart.com/paik.html)
  • “References to culture – high and low, ancient and modern, natural and technological – abound, from the Egyptian pyramids to cuneiform tablets, from Mozart’s Requiem to MTV.” (http://www.ndoylefineart.com/paik.html)
  • He focused on the relationship of art and technology. He searched for the use and abuse of the relationship. (http://www.artnet.com/artists/nam-june-paik/)
  • “He was interested in a global consciousness and understanding, and a pacifistic use of new technologies, from satellites to the Internet, and believed that multimedia fine art can contribute to this reality, in a more meaningful way than the applied arts or popular culture.” (http://www.ndoylefineart.com/paik.html)
  • “In the 1990s, his work became even more iconic and sophisticated, technically and expressively.” (http://www.ndoylefineart.com/paik.html)
    • He used laser installations from Norman Ballard’s Sweet and Sublime shapes and Jacob’s Ladder design in a site specific work called Modulations in Sync (2000) which was the centerpiece of the exhibition held in the entire building of Frank Lloyd Wright.
    • Another piece in this exhibition called Pyramid II (1997) is comprised of laser, prisms, motors, and a mirrored chamber.
    • He concentrated on the medium of laser from the late 1990s.
  • “In 1974, he coined the term “information superhighway” in a study he did for the Rockefeller Foundation. He claimed that the medium of holography and the Internet are the most promising mediums; he envisioned the Internet as a way to bring nations together, in particular the nation of China, and hoped that this union will affect the world in a positive way.” (http://www.ndoylefineart.com/paik.html)
  • He explored some themes:
    • bringing the past and the present together
    • issues that arise from new technologies
    • the role of artists in helping us to understand the changes around us
    • breaking down the barriers between “high” and “low” art
    • bringing together art and everyday life
    • combining visual art and music
    • use of ancient and modern, and living and inanimate (“dead”)
  • “A site-specific (created especially for a site) installation at the University of California at San Diego, Something Pacific, consists of old TV monitors embedded in the landscape outside of the building.” “Also, it includes Buddha statues and Rodin’s Thinker.” “Inside the lobby of the building are “living” TV’s which contain interactive programs.” (http://www.ndoylefineart.com/paik.html)
  • “He was also interested in using technology toward globalization, with satellites and the Internet. With satellites covering activity such as armed conflict, global awareness can bring enough viewer sympathy to halt these conflicts. International cultural works, with input from many nations, can also help bring the world together, showing diverse and seemingly “opposed” cultures, such as indigenous and contemporary populations; and glimpses of everyday life in cultures usually seen as very different from one another, emphasizing our commonality. We can also see commonality in various times – the union of art and technology in previous times, such as ancient Egyptian pyramids, and other Egyptian technical know-how, such as mummification and pigment-making. East and West, racial, religious and national boundaries can hopefully be overcome with these technologies.” (http://www.ndoylefineart.com/paik.html)
  • “Paik’s work reveals how TV has altered our Western landscape; in America it has perhaps defined our landscape, as it does in his piece Something Pacific. He used the disjointed and frenetic qualities of our TV experience in his work, but he combined these qualities with images of ancient and timeless, poetic and meditative The instantaneous and the contemplative are combined, reflecting and enriching our world.” (http://www.ndoylefineart.com/paik.html)

 

Legacy: How is your artist remembered

  • He is known as the “Father of video art.” (Founder of video art)
  • He is credited for creating the term “Electronic Super Highway” in application to telecommunications.
    • “The ideas of cultural free trade that Paik wrote about and championed have been made manifest through the birth of social media and sites such as YouTube where today’s artists can distribute their work freely to an international population. The possibilities offered today via the Internet hearken back to Paik’s early predictions of an electronic superhighway.” (https://www.theartstory.org/artist-paik-nam-june-life-and-legacy.htm)
  • The Nam June Paik Archive is preserved in Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. (https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/nam-june-paik-archive-77502)
    • The archive includes his early writings on art, history and technology.
    • Correspondence with other artists and collaborators like Charlotte Moorman, John Cage, George Maciunas and Wolf Vostell.
    • A complete collection of videotapes used in his work, as well as production notes, television work, sketches, notebooks, models and plans for videos.
    • It also covers early-model televisions and video projectors, radios, record players, cameras and musical instruments, toys, games, folk sculptures and the desk where he painted in his SoHo studio.
    • His major posthumous retrospective, entitled Nam June Paik: Global Visionary, was also mounted at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2012-2013.
  • Nam June Paik: Videa ‘n’ Videology 1959-1973, edited by Judson Rosebush; published by the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York, in 1974.
    • includes his early works and writings
  • The Nam June Paik Art Center opened in Gyeonggi, Korea, in 2008.
  • His video opera performance Coyote 3 (1997) is at the Anthology Film Archives in New York.
  • His works are exhibited in
    • The Museum of Modern Art in New York (+ 41 online exhibitions and 85 works online in its website.)
    • MoMA PS1 in New York
    • The Art Institute of Chicago
    • The National Gallery of Australia in Canberra
    • The Reina Sofia National Museum in Madrid
    • The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, Korea
    • The Detroit Institute of Arts
    • The Art Museum of the Americas in Washington D.C.
    • Daimler-Chrysler Collection in Berlin
    • Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan
    • The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C.
    • The Honolulu Museum of Art
    • Kunstmuseum St. Gallen in Switzerland
    • Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Dusseldorf, Germany
    • Museum Wiesbaden in Germany
    • The Berardo Collection Museum in Lisbon, Portugal
    • The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium
    • The Smart Museum of Art in University of Chicago
    • The Stuart Collection in University of California, San Diego
    • The Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio
    • The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota
    • The Rose Garden Archive of New Media Art
    • Cornell University Library in Ithaca, NY
    • … and in more galleries, universities, and museums around the world

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nam_June_Paik)

  • Honors and awards
    • 1991: Goslarer Kaiserring
    • 1992: Picasso Medal
    • 1993: Golden Lion, Venice Biennale
    • 1995: Ho-Am Prize in the Arts
    • 1998: Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy
    • 2001: Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize, awarded by the City of Duisburg
    • 2001: Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, International Sculpture Center
    • 2004: Edward MacDowell Medal in the Arts
    • 2007: Order of Cultural Merit

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nam_June_Paik)

  • “His groundbreaking exploration and use of modern technologies laid the foundation for a new generation of artists in today’s complex media culture.” (https://www.theartstory.org/artist-paik-nam-june-life-and-legacy.htm)
  • The contemporary American multimedia artist Jon Kessler describes, “Paik laid the groundwork for artists like me who play with the apparatus and mechanisms of the medium, turn it in on itself, and come through the rabbit hole still believing that it’s possible to make engaging, playful, and serious work.”
  • Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum Elizabeth Broun claims, “If Picasso stands astride the first half of the 20th century like a colossus, Nam June Paik is the center of gravity for all that was new in the second half of that hundred-year span. We are only now learning how profoundly his imagination embraced and transformed our world.”

 

Images

  • 10 images of their actual artwork/designs/sketches

Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (1995)

Egg Grows (1984-1989)

Family of Robot (1986)

Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984)

Global Groove (1973)

Ommah (2005)

TV Buddha (1974)

TV Cello (1976)

TV Garden (1974-2000)

Zen for TV (1963)

Megatron/Matrix (1995)

 

  • 10 images related to their work

Announcement for the airing of Global Groove by Nam June Paik and John Godfrey, WNET TV, October 2, 1974 FluxusJohn Cage Music Notes Nam June Paik Symphony No. 5 (1965)Poster for Exposition of Music – Electronic Television, Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal, March 11–20, 1963 Poster for Video Synthesizer (1972)Untitled Newspaper Drawing 1Untitled Newspaper Drawing 2Untitled Newspaper Drawing 3The Monthly Review of the University for Avant-garde Hinduism Mailing (1964)

  • 10 images of things, objects, contemporary images that remind you of the artist

Nam June Paik with Charlotte Moorman  TV Cello (modern)
Good Morning Mr. Orwell Exhibition
Nam June Paik Library in Nam June Paik Art Center, KoreaNam June Paik TV Show in KoreaPre-Bell-Man, statue in front of the ‘Museum für Kommunikation’, Frankfurt am Main, GermanyThe More the Better (1988) TV Buddha another versionUntitled (1993); known as Piano Piece

Turtle (1993)

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