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Concept
Nam June Paik
Summary
Nam June Paik (백남준; July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" to describe the future of telecommunications.
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.
Born in Seoul in 1932 in what was now 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.
In 1950, during the Korean War, Paik and his family fled from their home in Korea, first fleeing to Hong Kong, but later moving 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.
Paik then moved to West Germany in 1957 to study music history with composer Thrasybulos Georgiades at Munich University. While studying in Germany, Paik met the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage and the conceptual artists Sharon Grace as well as George Maciunas, Joseph Beuys and Wolf Vostell.
In 1961, Paik returned to Tokyo to explore the country's advanced technologies.
Official source
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