Nam June Paik
1932-2006
Nam June Paik is a major contemporary artist and a seminal figure in video art. His video sculptures, installations, performances and single-channel videos encompass one of the most influential and significant bodies of work in the medium. From his Fluxus-based performances and altered television sets of the early 1960s, to his ground-breaking videotapes and multi-media installations of the 1970s, '80s and '90s, Paik has made an enormous contribution to the history and development of video as an art form. Exercising radical art-making strategies with irreverent humor, he deconstructs and demystifies the language, content and technology of television. Merging global communications theories with an antic Pop sensibility, his iconoclastic works explore the juncture of art and popular culture. In the 1970s, Paik began a series of tapes, including Global Groove (1973), that were extraordinarily influential and innovative. Applying surreal conceptual wit and "neo-Dada" irony, he established a radical syntax of video based on the visual and aural grammar of television, appropriating and then derailing its very language. Densely layered with witty intertextual references and transcultur…
Films