Achievements: Paik has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including two major retrospectives, and has been featured in major international art exhibitions including Documenta, the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial. The Nam June Paik Art Center opened in a suburb of Seoul, South Korea, in 2008. Paik's 1995 piece Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, is on permanent display at the Lincoln Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Christie's Auction House sold a Paik work for $646,000 in 2007. | About the Artist: Paik and his family fled Korea in 1950 at the outset of the Korean War, first to Hong Kong, then to Japan. Paik graduated from the University of Tokyo with a degree in art in 1956, and then traveled to Germany to pursue his interest in avant-garde music, composition and performance. After immigrating to the United States in 1964, he settled in New York City where he expanded his experiments with video and television as fine art. Paik was one of the first artists to use a portable video camcorder. Paik invented a new artistic medium with television and video. Paik is internationally recognized as the “Father of Video Art.” In 1977 Paik married the Japanese video artist Shigeko Kubota. Paik was a lifelong Buddhist who never smoked, nor drank alcoholic beverages, and never drove a car. About the Artwork: In a pre-internet era Paik predicted that ‘technology would enable people to communicate immediately’. For Paik, television was an instrument in a global network of communication. Paik foresaw the importance of mass media and new technologies, coining the phrase ‘electronic superhighway’ in 1974 to predict the future of communication in an internet age. Paik used everyday objects like television sets or sandals to make connections with philosophy, mostly his interest in Zen Buddhism. Paik was known for making robots out of television sets. Paik's most famous work, TV Buddha is a video installation depicting a Buddha statue viewing its own live image on a infinite closed circuit TV. Paik would often combine Western and Eastern (Asian) symbolism. |
Sources:
https://www.paikstudios.com/
https://americanart.si.edu/artist/nam-june-paik-3670
https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/nam-june-paik-2021/
https://www.paikstudios.com/
https://americanart.si.edu/artist/nam-june-paik-3670
https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/nam-june-paik-2021/