Nam June Paik

Paik Nam June
Nam June Paik in New York City, 1983. Photo by Lim Young-kyun
Born	(1932-07-20)20 July 1932 Seoul, South Korea
Died	29 January 2006(2006-01-29) (aged 73) Miami, Florida, United States
Nationality	American
Education	University of Tokyo, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
Known for	Video art, performance, installation art
Movement	Fluxus
Spouse(s)	Shigeko Kubota

Nam June Paik (Korean: 백남준, July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with an early usage (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" in application to telecommunications.

Born in Seoul in 1932, the youngest of five siblings, Paik had two older brothers and two older sisters. His (who in 2002 was revealed to be a Chinilpa) owned a major textile manufacturing firm. As he was growing up, he was trained as a classical pianist. In 1950, Paik and his family had to flee from their home in Korea, during the Korean War. His family first fled to Hong Kong, but later moved to Japan. Six years later he graduated from the University of Tokyo where he wrote a thesis on the composer Arnold Schoenberg.

Paik then moved to West Germany to study music history with composer Thrasybulos Georgiades at Munich University. While studying in Germany, Paik met the composers and John Cage and the conceptual artists George Maciunas, Joseph Beuys and Wolf Vostell and was from 1962 on, a member of Fluxus.

Nam June Paik then began participating in the Neo-Dada art movement, known as Fluxus, which was inspired by the composer John Cage and his use of everyday sounds and noises in his music. He made his big debut in 1963 at an exhibition known as Exposition of Music-Electronic Television at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal in which he scattered televisions everywhere and used magnets to alter or distort their images. In a 1960 piano performance in Cologne, he played Chopin, threw himself on the piano and rushed into the audience, attacking Cage and pianist David Tudor by cutting their clothes with scissors and dumping shampoo on their heads.