Nam June Paik (백남준; 1932–2006) was an influential Korean American artist best known for his innovative use of electronic media in his work. He is considered the founder of video art. Paik was born in Seoul, Korea to a wealthy family that owned a textile manufacturing company. In 1950 at the beginning of the Korean War, he and his father fled Korea, moving first to Hong Kong, then later to Japan. He studied music, art history, and aesthetics at the University of Tokyo. In 1956, Paik moved to Germany and continued to study Western music and composition at the Universities of Munich and Freiburg. Paik became interested in electronic music while in Germany, where he met John Cage, an American composer/artist and music theorist. Paik began participating in the Neo-Dada art movement, and began using televisions in his work.
In 1964, Paik moved to New York, where he remained for more than forty years. He became a pioneering artist of multimedia installation art, combining video, performance, and music. Moving away from traditional art materials, Paik incorporated televisions, a popular household object, and video, new media at that time, into his art.
May is also National Preservation Month. Paik’s work certainly presents a big challenge to curators and conservators - including our colleagues at the Harvard Art Museums for presenting and preserving the physical integrity of his installations and the media formats he used. Time-based multimedia and digital artworks pose critical questions on how best to preserve and present works in the future when the underlying technology is no longer readily available.
TV Garden, 1974 Image 1 Left: Kunsthalle Bremen, Nov. 14 – Jan. 23, 2000 Right: Installation, 1982
Image 2 Left: Guggenheim Museum, NY, Feb. 11–April 26, 2000 Right: Guggenheim Museum, NY, June 28, 2002–Jan. 12, 2003
Paik's virtual archive : time, change, and materiality in media art Hölling, Hanna [author] Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2017 HOLLIS number: 990149442150203941
