Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik[a] (Korean: 백남준; RR: Baek Nam-jun; July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a Korean artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art.[1][2] He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" to describe the future of telecommunications.[3]
Nam June Paik
January 29, 2006 (aged 73)
Korean, American
Video art, performance, installation art
Jinu (grandson)
Ken Paik Hakuta (nephew)
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Baek Namjun
Paek Namjun
Born in Seoul to a wealthy business family, Paik trained as a classical musician, spending time in Japan and West Germany, where he joined the Fluxus collective and developed a friendship with experimental composer John Cage. He moved to New York City in 1964 and began working with cellist Charlotte Moorman to create performance art. Soon after, he began to incorporate televisions and video tape recorders into his work, acquiring growing fame. A stroke in 1996 left him partially paralyzed for the last decade of his life.
Early life and education[edit]
Born in Seoul in 1932 in present-day South Korea, the youngest of five children, Paik had two older brothers and two older sisters. His father, who in 2002 was revealed to be a Chinilpa, or a Korean who collaborated with the Japanese during the latter's occupation of Korea, owned a major textile manufacturing firm. As he was growing up, he was trained as a classical pianist. By virtue of his affluent background, Paik received an elite education in modern (largely Western) music through his tutors.[4]: 43
In 1950, during the Korean War, Paik and his family fled from their home in Korea, first fleeing to Hong Kong, but later moved to Japan. Paik graduated with a BA in aesthetics from the University of Tokyo in 1956, where he wrote a thesis on the composer Arnold Schoenberg.[5]
Paik then moved to West Germany in 1957 to study music history with composer Thrasybulos Georgiades at Munich University.[4]: 19 [6] While studying in Germany, Paik met the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage and the conceptual artists Sharon Grace, George Maciunas, Joseph Beuys, and Wolf Vostell.
Career[edit]
In 1961, Paik returned to Tokyo to explore the country's advanced technologies.[7]: 14 While living in Japan between 1962 and 1963, Paik first acquired a Sony Port-a-Pak, the first commercially available video recorder, perhaps by virtue of his close friendship with Nobuyuki Idei, who was an executive at (and later president of) the Sony corporation.[4]: 19–20
From 1962, Paik was a member of the experimental art movement Fluxus.[8][9]
In 1964, Paik immigrated to the United States of America and began living in New York City, where he began working with classical cellist Charlotte Moorman, to combine his video, music, and performance.[4]: 20 [10]
From 1979 to 1996 Paik was professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
After nearly 35 years of being exiled from his motherland of Korea,[4]: 43 Paik returned to South Korea on June 22, 1984.[11]: 152 From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Paik played an integral role in Korea's art scene. As the curator Lee Sooyon has argued, Paik became more than just an illustrious visitor to Korea, he became the leader who helped open Korea's art scene to the broader international art world.[11]: 154
He opened solo exhibitions in Korea and mounted two world-wide broadcast projects for the 1986 Asia Games and the 1988 Olympics, both hosted in Seoul, and organized a number of exhibitions in Korea. Some exhibitions coordinated by Paik introduced John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Joseph Beuys to Korea's art scene; others brought recent developments in video art and interactivity from Europe and the U.S. to Korea, in ways that bridged similar activities in Korea's art scene.[11]: 154 Paik was also involved in bringing the 1993 Whitney Biennial to Seoul, as well as in founding the Gwangju Biennale and establishing the Korea Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Beginning with his artistic career in Germany in the 1960s—and on through his immigration to the U.S., later involvement in South Korea's art scene, and broader participation in international artistic currents—Paik's transnational path informed both his identity and his artistic practice in complex ways.[4]: 48 At the outset of his career in Europe, Paik declared, "The yellow peril! C'est moi," in a 1964 pamphlet, a reference to his Asian identity that, as the curators June Yap and Lee Soo-yon have noted, appropriates a xenophobic phrase coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II as Paik referenced his Asian identity.[11]: 158 [12]
Curator John Hanhardt observed that certain works recall Paik's lived experience of transnational immigration from South Korea to Japan, Germany, and on the U.S.; one example is Guadalcanal Requiem (1977), which invokes "the history and memories of World War II in the Pacific."[4]: 43 Hanhardt has also concluded that—though "no single story" of Nam June Paik can capture the complexity of who he was and the places that shaped him—as Paik grew in public, transcultural, and global recognition, he held onto the significance of his birthplace in Korea.[4]: 48 Similarly, the curator Lee Sook-kyung has called identifying what is Korea, Japanese, American, or German about Nam June Paik to be a "futile" effort,[7]: 9 yet she has observed that Paik consistently emphasized his Korean heritage and "Mongolian" lineages.[7]: 135
Public collections that hold or have exhibited work by Nam June Paik include:
Archive[edit]
Given its largely antiquated technology, Paik's oeuvre poses a unique conservation challenge.[87] In 2006, Nam June Paik's estate asked a group of museums for proposals on how each would use the archive. Out of a group that included the Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, it chose the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The archive includes Paik's early writings on art history, history and technology; correspondence with other artists and collaborators like Charlotte Moorman, John Cage, George Maciunas and Wolf Vostell; and 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.[42]
Curator John Hanhardt, an old friend of Paik, said of the archive: "It came in great disorder, which made it all the more complicated. It is not like his space was perfectly organized. I think the archive is like a huge memory machine. A wunderkammer, a wonder cabinet of his life."[88] Hanhardt describes the archives in the catalog for the 2012 Smithsonian show in the book Nam June Paik: Global Visionary.[89]
Michael Mansfield, associate curator of film and media arts at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, supervised the complex installation of several hundred CRT TV sets, the wiring to connect them all, and the software and servers to drive them. He developed an app on his phone to operate every electronic artwork on display.[90]
Many of Paik's early works and writings are collected in a volume edited by Judson Rosebush titled Nam June Paik: Videa 'n' Videology 1959–1973, published by the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York, in 1974.
Influence[edit]
As a pioneer of video art his influence was from a student he met at CalArts named Sharon Grace he described her as "pure genius" from the moment they met. The two met while she was filming fellow students at random with her Sony Portapak as an artistic sociological practice akin to the artist in the studio. This led to TV Buddha and people's model of the internet as we know it today with such art pieces as "Send / Receive". The artwork and ideas of Nam June Paik were a major influence on late 20th-century art and continue to inspire a new generation of artists. Contemporary artists considered to be influenced by Paik include Christian Marclay, Jon Kessler, Cory Arcangel, Ryan Trecartin and Haroon Mirza.[40]
Nam June Paik's work was first screened in Korea on March 20, 1974, at the United States Information Center in Seoul.[91]: 196 The artist Park Hyunki was among the audience (which featured Paik's Global Groove); the screening notably inspired Park Hyunki to first experiment with video.[91]: 196
Personal life[edit]
Paik moved to New York City in 1964.[93] In 1977, he married the video artist Shigeko Kubota.[94] After marrying Kubota and living in the United States for several decades, Paik became a naturalized American citizen.[95]
Paik was a lifelong Buddhist who never smoked nor drank alcoholic beverages, and never drove a car.[94]
Legacy[edit]
Paik was survived by his wife, his brother, Ken Paik, and a nephew, Ken Paik Hakuta, an inventor and television personality best known for creating the Wacky WallWalker toy, and who managed Paik's studios in New York City.[94][98]
In one of his last interviews, Paik voiced his belief that to be buried in a cemetery would be futile, and expressed a desire for his ashes to be scattered around the world, and for some of his ashes to be buried in Korea.[99]
Quotations related to Nam June Paik at Wikiquote
Media related to Nam June Paik at Wikimedia Commons