PAIK, NAM JUNE

Nam June Paik (July 20, 1932 Seoul, South Korea – January 29, 2006 Miami Beach, Florida) was an American composer and visual artist from South Korea and is regarded as the founder of video and media art.

Nam June Paik was a pioneer of video art, who, according to own statements, was encouraged by Karl Otto Götz to engage with the medium of television in an artistic way.

He was the son of a Korean textile and steel entrepreneur. At the beginning of the Korean War, his family fled to Tokyo in Hong Kong in 1950, where he studied Western aesthetics, musicology, and art sciences from 1952 to 1956.

From 1958 to 1963 he worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen in the Cologne studio for electronic music of the WDR.
In Cologne also studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen and was originally composer.
Later, as a member of the Fluxus movement, he became a visual artist.

Nam June Paik was a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1979 to 1996, but lived mainly in New York.
Paik is often referred to as the “father of the video art”. He absorbed impulses from music and fine arts, as well as technical innovations, and implemented them in his art.