Nam June Paik
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Chosŏn'gŭl: | 백남준 |
|s |south |rok |sk
| #default =Nam June Paik (July 20, 1932 - January 29, 2006) was a South Korean-born American artist. He worked on several mediums of art but was often being credited for discovering and inventing the medium known as video art.
Born in Seoul, he had a father who worked as a textile manufacturer and four older brothers. As he was growing up, he was trained as a classical pianist. In 1950, Paik and his family had to flee from their home in Korea, due to the Korean War. His family first fled to Hong Kong, but later moved to Japan, for reasons unknown. Six years later, he graduated from the University of Tokyo, thus concluding his studies on both the Histories of Art, and the Histories on Music. He wrote a thesis on Arnold Schoenberg, an important composer, music theorist and teacher.
That year, he moved to Germany, to study yet again, the History of Music at Munich University. While he was studying in Germany, Paik met the composers – Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage as well as the conceptual artists Joseph Beuys and Wolf Vostell. After meeting them, Paik was inspired to go into electronic art. Paik worked with Stockhausen and Cage in a studio for electronic music.
Nam June Paik then began participating in the Neo-Dada art movement, known as Fluxus, which was inspired by the composer John Cage, and his use of everyday sounds and noises in his music. He made his big debut at an exhibition known as, “Exposition of Music-Electronic Television”, in which he scattered televisions everywhere, and used magnets to alter or disort their images.
In 1964, Paik moved to New York, and began working with classical cellist Charlotte Moorman, to combine his video, music, and performance. In the work “TV Cello”, the pair stacked televisions on top one another, so that they formed the shape of an actual cello. When Moorman drew her bow across the “cello”, images of both her playing, and images of other cellists playing appeared on the screens. In 1965, Sony introduced the Portapak, Paik's greatest weapon. With this, he could both move and record things, for it was the first portable video and audio recorder. From there, Paik became an international celebrity, known for his creative and entertaining works. A few are listed below.
In a notorious 1967 incident, Charlotte Moorman was arrested for going topless whilst performing in Paik’s “Opera Sextronique”. Two years later, in 1969, they performed “TV Bra for Living Sculpture”, in which Charlotte wore a bra with small TV screens over her breasts<ref>http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/tv-bra/</ref>. Paik developed the idea of an 'Electronic Superhighway' as early as 1974 in his text 'Media Planning for the Postindustrial Society'<ref>http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/source-text/33/</ref>.
In another one of Paik’s pieces, Something Pacific (1986), a statue of a sitting Buddha faces its image on a closed circuit television. (The piece is part of the Stuart Collection of public art at the University of California, San Diego.) Another piece, “Positive Egg”, displays a white egg on a black background. In a series of video monitors, increasing in size, the image on the screen becomes larger and larger, until the egg itself becomes an abstract, unrecognizable shape. In "Video Fish"<ref>http://www.insecula.com/contact/A009212.html</ref>, a piece from 1975, a series of aquariums arranged in a horizontal line contain live fish swimming in front an equal number of monitors which show video images of other fish.
Paik was also known for making robots out of television sets. They were constructed using pieces of wire, and metal, but as time progressed, Paik used parts from radio and television sets.
A retrospective of Paik's work was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the spring of 1982. Although Nam June Paik was famous all over the planet, he never once forgot about his home in South Korea, where he was raised. During the New Year's Day celebration in January 1, 1984, he aired "Good Morning, Mr. Orwell," a live link between WNET New York, Centre Pompidou Paris, and South Korea. With the participation of John Cage, Salvador Dalí, Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Merce Cunningham, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, George Plimpton, and other art superstars, Paik showed that George Orwell's Big Brother hadn't arrived. In 1986, Paik created a piece called “Bye Bye Kipling”, a tape that mixed live events from Seoul, South Korea; Tokyo, Japan; and New York. Two years later, in 1988 he further showed his love for his home with a piece called “The more the better,” a giant tower made entirely of one thousand three monitors for the Olympic Games being held at Seoul. In 1992 Nam June Paik made a piece called the spinning Buddha which can be seen at New Jersey's Newark Museum.
In 1996, Nam June Paik had a stroke, which left him partially paralyzed. A final restrospective of his work was held the spring of 2000 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, integrating the unique space of the museum into the exhibition itself. This coincided with a downtown gallery showing of video artworks by his wife Shigeko Kubota, mainly dealing with his recovery from the stroke. Nam June Paik died January 29, 2006, in Miami, Florida, due to natural causes.
Contents |
[edit] Works
[edit] References
<references/>
[edit] External links
| Wikimedia Commons has media related to: |
- Official Website of Nam June Paik
- Guggenheim: The Worlds of Nam June Paik
- New Ontology of Music essay by Nam June Paik; from Monthly Review of the University for Avant-garde Hinduism
- 9/23 Paik-Abe videosynthesizer performance from WGBH New Television Workshop archives, features short clip
- Electronic Arts Intermix includes a biography and description of major works
- Nam June Paik biography @ MedienKunstNetz
- " If You Miss Paik Nam-June", The Korea Times, February 5, 2006.
- "Paik Nam-june to Be Buried in Homeland", The Korea Times, January 31, 2006.
- "Father of Video Art Paik Nam-june Dies", The Chosun Ilbo, January 30, 2006.
- "Video artist Nam June Paik dead at 74", CNN, January 30, 2006.
[edit] Listening
- UbuWeb: Nam June Paik featuring Abschiedssymphonie and In Memoriam George Maciunas MP3s offline
- TV Cello, Nam June Paik & Charlotte Moorman performance (MP3: part 1, part 2)
- Concert for TV Cello and Videotapes, Nam June Paik with Charlotte Moorman and Paul Garrin, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1982 (MP3: part 1, part 2, part 3)
- MP3 Variations on a Theme by Saint-Saens Charlotte Moorman live at Mills College 03/08/1974
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paik, Nam-june |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Paik, Nam June; Nam-june, Paik; Nam June, Paik, Baek Nam-jun, Paek Nam-jun |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | video artist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 20, 1932 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Seoul, South Korea |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 29, 2006 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Miami, Florida, United States of America |
de:Nam June Paik fr:Nam June Paik ko:백남준 id:Nam June Paik nl:Paik Nam-june ja:ナムジュン・パイク no:Nam June Paik pl:Nam June Paik pt:Nam June Paik ru:Пэк Нам Джун sv:Nam June Paik
