Nam-Jun Paik (Korean/American, 1932 - 2006)

Nam-Jun Paik was born in Seoul, Korea in 1932 and is now an American citizen. Paik has been a central figure in avant-garde art throughout his career, and his innovative work in the fields of video art, performance art, installation art, satellite transmission, painting and music composition has had a profound influence on contemporary art.

After his family fled Korea in 1950, he studied philosophy, history and music in Tokyo, moving to Germany to study music theory at the University in Munich and the Freiburg conservatory, where he discovered electronic music and met the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who became one of his major teachers.

Paik's first solo exhibition, in Wuppertal, Germany in 1963, introduced his "adapted" television sets and launched a new era in 20th century art. His work incorporating art and technology soon made him a major international artist. Paik's recent work is a series of monumental video installations.

For the 1988 Seoul Olympics, he created the tower “The More the Better,” an installation comprising 1003 video monitors. “Fin de Siécle II” (1989) shown at New York’s Whitney Museum as part of an exhibition on art and media culture, used a wall of monitors to present popular culture. At the 1993 Venice Biennial, where he represented Germany, Paik’s installation “Electronic Super Highway” received the prize for best pavillion. Another recent monumental work, “Megatron,” a video wall of more than 200 monitors, was shown in 1997 at the Guggenheim Museum-Soho in New York.