Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik ( born July 20, 1932 in Seoul, South Korea, † January 29, 2006 in Miami Beach, Florida) was a native of South Korea, American composer and visual artist and is considered a founder of video and media art.
Importance
Nam June Paik was a pioneer of video art, which was inspired by his own admission Karl Otto Götz explained, to deal in an artistic manner with the medium of television. He was originally a composer and studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne. Only later, as a member of the Fluxus movement, he was a visual artist. 1962 was followed by Fluxus concerts and performances in Wiesbaden, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris and Dusseldorf. In 1963 he installed in the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal 12 televisions with technically manipulated screen images. Nam June Paik was from 1979 to 1996 professor at the Art Academy in Dusseldorf, but lived mostly in New York. Paik is repeatedly referred to as " the father of video art." But Les Levine created the first closed-circuit installation, and also Vostell worked simultaneously at the technical manipulation of picture tubes. Paik Eastern thought with Western avant-garde. He reached to pulses of music and visual art as well as new technical innovations and put them into his art.
Life
Nam June Paik was the son of a Korean textile and steel entrepreneur. His family fled at the start of the Korean War in 1950 through Hong Kong to Tokyo. Here Paik studied from 1952 to 1956 Western aesthetics, musicology and the arts. Subject of his thesis was the work of the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg. In the same year Paik continued his musicology studies at the University of Munich and also studied composition with Wolfgang Fortner at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg. From 1958 to 1963 he worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne's Studio for Electronic Music of the WDR. In performances of Stockhausen's composition Originals 1961 Paik worked with as a musician. Here he developed the concept of " action music " in which he smashed instruments and also random noise to classical sounds mixed who came among others also from tape devices. He was inspired here by the American composer John Cage, which he 1960, the tie section at a performance of his composition Etude for Pianoforte. Throughout his life would remain Paik 's artistic beginnings in Rhineland connected, in particular the Galerie 22 in Dusseldorf and Cologne artist Mary Bauermeister, in whose studio in the Lintgasse 28 he brought his earliest works to be heard.
As a member of Fluxus, he appeared in the early 1960s with various performances, came this way for experimental art, and finally to work with televisions as art objects. At first he was not working with video, but manipulated television, so they changed the existing television and distorted reproductions. He also built sound installations with experimentally modified record players and tape recorders. As Sony in the late 1960s, affordable video cameras and recorders brought to the market, he went on to produce videotapes.
In a " 24 -hour Happening " along with Joseph Beuys at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal on June 5, 1965 Paik led to his Robot Opera. He announced: " Television has attacked us for a lifetime, now we fight back ." Other participants were Bazon Brock, Charlotte Moorman, Eckart Rahn, Tomas Schmit and Wolf Vostell. Following the happening they told the photographer of the action, Ute Klophaus, to co-author and participant action.
Together with the Japanese engineer Shuya Abe, Paik developed an analog video synthesizer, physically connected to the TV and video images - for example, with color changes - could be manipulated. The images obtained were based on his video installations and videotapes. His video Global Groove 1973 took the aesthetics of the music video in advance. A self-professed Buddhist Paik ironized 1974 his faith with TV Buddha, a closed-circuit video installation with a bronze Buddha sitting opposite a screen and apparently meditating on his live recording, but showing a laterally correct image.
One of his most important cooperation partners had since the late 1960s and early 1970s, the American cellist Charlotte Moorman. In a performance in 1967 in New York, where both artists were encountered with bare torsos, they were arrested by the police.
Since 1980, Paik created mainly multi-monitor video installations, in which he ordered television monitors to sculptures and used for simultaneous playback of multiple video sequences. 1982 Paik excited by a spectacular installation of 384 monitors in the Centre Pompidou in Paris sensation. In 1984 he participated in the exhibition From here - Two months new German art in Dusseldorf part. At the Olympic Summer Games in Seoul in 1988 the Koreans presented with a media tower from 1,003 monitors, entitled The More The Better an even larger piece of art.
Nam June Paik was a U.S. citizen and married in 1977 the Japanese-American video artist Shigeko Kubota. In the same year he took part in documenta 6 in Kassel.
Invited by the then Commissioner for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Klaus Bussmann, Paik received as a cultural nomad 1993 along with the New York-based German artist Hans Haacke the Golden Lion for the best national pavilion. Nam June Paik was also participant of documenta 8 in 1987 in Kassel.
His work has been honored with numerous solo exhibitions and prizes. Many of his objects and installations can be seen in prominent museums. His nephew, Ken Paik Hakuta directs the Nam June Paik Studio in New York City.
In 1996 he suffered a stroke and has since half side paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair. However, his creativity was unbroken, he realized his artistic ideas with the help of assistants. 1999 elected him the ARTnews magazine the most influential artists of the 20th century. Since 2002, named after him, Nam June Paik Award is awarded for media art.
The Kyonggi Cultural Foundation invited in 2003 to an international design competition to realize with the aim of a Paik Museum in Yongin ( Gyeonggi Province ). The completion of the museum did not live Paik; He died on January 29, 2006 in Miami. According to Paik's testamentary disposition cremation took place, and the urn was transferred to Korea.
The winning design by the Berlin architect Kirsten Schemel was built by the end of 2008, around 30 kilometers south of Seoul in collaboration with the originating also from Berlin architect Marina Stankovic and after repeated revision. The opening ceremony, in which also the Paik's widow was present, took place in October 2008.
Works (selection)
Part of the collection of the ZKM, Karlsruhe:
Museum of Modern Art ( MMK), Frankfurt am Main
Essl Museum - Contemporary Art, Klosterneuburg / Vienna: