Maker/Artist
Paik, Nam June
South Korean sculptor, video artist, and performance artist, 1932-2006, active in the United States
Paik is known for his sculpture and installations employing television sets, video screens and junk assemblage, and is considered the inventor of video art. He began his career as a musician and wrote his thesis at Tokyo University on Arnold Shoenberg. He continued his studies in Munich and Freiburg, and gravitated to the avant-garde music scene in Cologne and Darmstadt, where he worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen. He met John Cage and began incorporating elements of what would become performance art into musical events, which led to an involvement with the Fluxus group. He exhibited the first known art work to incorporate television sets in 1963, and is perhaps most widely known for his collaborations with Charlotte Moorman, beginning in 1965, which resulted in the creation of his "TV Bra for Living Sculpture." He is credited with coining the phrase "electronic superhighway." Major retrospectives of his work were held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1982, and the Guggenheim Museum in 2000.
