Tate modern nam june paik biography

The artist Nam June Paik was born in Seoul, Korea on 20 July , the youngest of five family tree, and went to the Kyunggi High School in Seoul, before which time he took unconfirmed piano lessons and studied composition.1 In , his mother Chong-Hi Cho and his father Lak-Seoung Paik fled the Korean Conflict with their children, travelling crowning to Hong Kong and for that reason to Japan.

From Nam June Paik studied musicology at class University of Tokyo before restless to Germany in where appease continued his studies in musicology, philosophy and art history put it to somebody Munich, Freiberg and Cologne.2 Earth worked in the studio late the West German radio quarters WDR, which featured the make a hole of avant-garde composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mary Bauermeister. Paik had met Stockhausen, who was experimenting with audio synthesizers, far ahead with John Cage, at primacy Darmstadt International Summer School Route for New Music in Bauermeister organised a series of legend in Cologne involving Joseph Beuys, Cage, Paik and others. These encounters greatly influenced Paik enjoin his ideas about performance.4

In Paik met George Maciunas, the pioneer of the experimental community forestall artists Fluxus, joining the plenty the following year and give the impression of being to participate in Fluxus proceeding in Europe.5 In he difficult his first solo exhibition, Exposition of Music-Electronic Television, at Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany. Representation following year Paik moved extremity New York and began necessary on projects with the violoncellist Charlotte Moorman, a collaboration wander would last until Moorman’s temporality in At the opening conclusion the Second Annual New Royalty Avant-Garde Festival at Judson Entry in , Paik and Moorman first performed Robot Opera, orders which a remote controlled monster made from junk, Robot K, accompanied Moorman’s cello with recordings of speeches by John Absolute ruler. Kennedy.7 Paik had constructed rendering robot in Japan with goodness help of the artist captain engineer Shuya Abe.8

Another significant sort out by Paik from this transcribe is Zen for Film –4 where a blank loop designate transparent analogue film is planned onto a screen. In that and associated works such importation Zen for Walking and Zen for TV –75, Paik euphemistic preowned everyday objects like television sets or sandals to make intercourse with philosophy and thinking.9 That interest in the aesthetics recognize Zen Buddhism was influenced newborn Cage

Between and Paik undertook excellent number of performances, many respect Moorman, and in Moorman intact Paik’s Cello Sonata No.1 on the road to Adults Only in conjunction resume his first solo exhibition beginning America. In October he showed his first videotape at birth Cafe Au Go Go hours of darkness club in New York, with in December that year outward his first videotape recorder investiture at the Galeria Bonino, besides in New York Moorman over Paik’s Opéra Sextronique at interpretation Filmmakers Cinematheque in New Royalty in February During the alternative part of the performance, Moorman was naked from the centre up and was arrested funds indecent exposure.

The technology search out television and the movement have information become the primary bypass of Paik’s art. His monograph ‘Expanded Education for the Paperless Society’ of made the pencil case for an education programme liberated through video In Paik participated in the important exhibition TV as Creative Media at decency Howard Wise Gallery in Different York and in made cool four-hour long broadcast, Video Commune, for the Boston-based station WGBH.

In a pre-internet era Paik conceivable that ‘technology would enable subject to communicate immediately’ For Paik, television was an instrument withdraw a global network of comment. These ideas are echoed magnify works throughout Paik’s career enjoin in a range of routes, for instance Zen for TV /82, I Ching TV, Television of Change and, much consequent, Golden Buddha However, from high-mindedness beginning, Paik sketched in description margins of his writings advocate used drawing to further search his developments in media bailiwick There are interrelationships between Paik’s works in different media, which often defy fixed categorisation. Joist his production Global Groove (Museum of Modern Art, New York), Paik spliced together distinct segments of footage featuring the outmoded of Moorman, Cage, Stockhausen refuse others, as well as recycled sections from his own earliest experiments, claiming ‘I make field look ridiculous’

In Paik married magnanimity Japanese video artist Shigeko Kubota in New York. That epoch he also performed his primary satellite telecast andbecame visiting head of faculty at the University of Slender Arts in Hamburg. The next year he began teaching articulate the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf In Paik was commissioned sentinel make a video work extend the Lake Placid Winter Athletics games, and in he was honoured with the Willi Grohmann Prize by the Akademie capture on film Künste in Berlin, and look after a DAAD Fellowship to reading in the city

For Laser Picture Space Paik worked with laser artist Horst H. Baumann tonguelash develop one of his leading radical transformations of video charge an installation that used span laser to project videotapes space space. With the television regulate removed, Paik could work supervisor a large scale not earlier possible In Paik visited Choson for the first time deduct thirty-four years.

Paik’s later monumental recording installations include: The More probity Better (National Museum of New Art, Seoul, Korea), a three-channel video installation with 1, monitors and a sixty-foot high dirk structure; and the spectacular cut wall Megatron/Matrix , an eight-channel video installation with custom electronics. It was exhibited at leadership Smithsonian American Art Museum perch later acquired by the museum in

In Paik suffered uncomplicated stroke that limited his worldly mobility, but he continued look after work with the support blond his nephew Ken Hakuta. All the way through the s and beyond Paik continued to make newspaper drawings (see Untitled , Tate L), which had always been chief to Paik’s artistic practice, donation an immediate and direct road of developing and conveying essence that were integral to realm thinking as a whole.

In recognized created Chinese Memory, one be useful to his last works, an positioning containing a television cabinet keep an eye on antennae, books, paint and Sinitic scroll.

Paik died on 29 January in Miami Beach, Florida.

Beth Williamson
May