Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik biography

The South Korean composer and performance, installation and video artist Nam June Paik initially studied music in Cologne. His teachers included John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. From 1958 to 1963, he worked at the Cologne Studio of Electronic Music, run by the German broadcasting company WDR. In the early 1960s, he became one of the co-founders of the Fluxus movement.

In his installations he particularly liked using technical media such as TVs, computers and audio equipment, which he sometimes manipulates technically and composes into sculptures (multi-monitor-video installations and a “Family of Robots” – humanoid figures composed of TVs, radios etc., from 1986). He is considered to be one of the founders of video art. After his move to New York in 1964, he conducted his Dadaist and Fluxus performances together with the cellist Charlotte Moorman. In 1977, he did so at a live broadcast, marking the opening of documenta 6, which he set up together with Joseph Beuys and Douglas Davis. He participated in this “Media Documenta” with a video environment entitled “TV Garden” – a jungle of TVs and tropical plants, ambivalently symbolising the bewildering complexity of our modern media and the symbiosis of nature and technology. He also took part in documenta 8 and represented Germany at the Venice Biennial In 1993. From 1979 to 1996, he held a professorship at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. In 2010, Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf held a retrospective, which it had developed jointly with the Tate Liverpool.