HELLO from KOREA

50 _ HELLO from KOREA
Paik Namjune
(1932 ~ )
How do you look at your television set?
Korean video artist Paik Namjune has been
asking audiences that question through his
work for the past thirty years. Most art critics
and artists consider Paik Namjune not only
the founder of video art but one of the most
important experimental artists of this century.
Much of his art work attempts to challenge
the way we look at television. In one
of his first exhibitions in New York City in
1965, he let the audience play with the
images on a television screen with giant
magnets. Later he used various techniques
to distort the broadcast
image from famous television
shows. His aim was to get his audiences
to see in a different light the
little “sacred” box omnipresent in
their homes.
Paik has never hesitated to
experiment with “sacred”
objects. While studying music
in Germany in the 1950s, he
performed on pianos which
had noise-makers, clocks and
assorted household objects glued
onto them. Sometimes he chopped or
wrecked the piano to obtain different
sounds. His goal was to use the unexpected
to show that art could be spontaneous and
to engage the audience directly.
Before moving to America in 1964, Paik
helped found the avant garde group Fluxus,
which was part of a larger movement to take
art out of the museum and to make it a part
of people’s everyday lives by experimenting
with a variety of different materials and techniques.
Paik then chose to play with video technology.
In the 1970s, He collaborated with
Shuya Abe to build a “video synthesizer”
which generated electronic video images
timed to music. In its first broadcast in
Boston, the video synthesizer played multicolored
images to the music of the Beatles.
Excited about video art’s possibilities, Paik
once proclaimed that the television screen
would replace the painter’s canvas.
To help make this a reality, Paik moved
onto larger, more elaborate projects. After V-
ramid (1982) and Tricolor Video (1982),
Paik created the first show broadcast
by satellite called Good Morning Mr.
Orwell (1984), a program which invited
performers and artists from
around the globe to contribute to
what he called a “Global Groove.”
In commemoration of the 1988
Seoul Olympics, Paik built a
massive work entitled The
More the Better, with over
1,000 video screens of various
shapes and sizes.
Born in Korea in 1932,
Paik has become a citizen
of the world. He was educated
in Tokyo and Munich,
taught and worked in New York,
and his pieces can be found across
the globe. This variety in education and
living places has given Paik the luxury of a
unique and broad perspective.
Paik Namjune, forever the innovator, has
used this global perspective to enhance our
perceptions of television, of the world and of
each other. Now past the age of sixty, Paik
remains active on the international art
scene. Though he has already earned his
place in history, this dynamic artist still has
his eyes set firmly on the future.