Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik was born in Seoul, South Korea on 20 July 1932. He would have had a good start as the son of a textile and fabric manufacturer, but the outbreak of the Korean War forced the family to flee via Hong Kong to Tokyo. Paik studied Art, Western Aesthetics and Music in Japan before moving to Germany in 1956. At the University of Tokyo, he had already chosen the German composer Arnold Schönberg as the subject of his final thesis, and at the Freiburg Academy of Music he now studied composition himself with Wolfgang Fortner. Paik subsequently worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen in the WDR studio for electronic music. He found his encounter with the composer John Cage in Darmstadt in 1958 particularly formative, and Paik is said to have even cut off the tie of the famous American during a performance of the Etude for Piani Forte as an idiosyncratic sign of appreciation.