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Nam June Paik Was The De Facto Father of Video Art

Video artist Nam June Paik was a legend. We remember him and spotlight some other video artist from Koreaa

On January 29th 2006, the digital arts world lost one of its progenitors to complications from a stroke. But the totality of Nam June Paik’s life is such a tour-de-force that immortality once seemed like an achievable feat for the South Korean-born artist. His works prodded, dissected and interrogated the 20th century’s flagship creation: a new intimacy between man and technology. His medium of choice? The television set, along with its implications of a coming future in which communication was predominantly digital and one-way.

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Starting from his first exhibit in Germany to the creation of one of his most widely known installations in 1995, the “Electronic Superhighway: Continental US, Alaska, Hawaii,” Nam June Paik’s repertoire eventually generated widespread harmony among critics and cadres of artworld observers that he was, and remains, the “father of video art.”

Electronic Superhighway: Continental US, Alaska, Hawaii

But this laurel wasn't always in the cards for him. His first fascinations with avant-garde expression rooted themselves in music, which he studied at the University of Tokyo in the late ‘50s. Following his graduation he then went on to continue his studies in Germany, where he met influential avant-garde composers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. From there, and spurred by Cage and Stockhausen’s words of encouragement, his interest in the experimental arts skyrocketed. In 1963 he debuted his first exhibit in West Germany that incorporated, perhaps for the first time ever in the installation art world, a collection of television sets.

Nam June Paik Studios

From then on, he’d utilize TVs en masse, with each exhibit cleverly broadcasting distorted arrays of compiled video reels, channel signals bending on magnet-tweaked screens, frozen images as one puzzle piece to larger multi-set constructions. His abstract approach to thinking outside the box literally allowed him to reinvent and revitalize what was inside the box in the first place.

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TV Cello

In the ‘70s and 80’s, he was even given access to creating his own national and international broadcasts with the help of other art kings across the globe. In “Good Morning, Mr. Orwell,” Nam June Paik collaborated with Salvador Dali, John Cage, Laurie Anderson, and Allen Ginsberg in what is now often regarded as the “first international satellite installation.” The edited clip premiered on January 1, 1984, in tandem with the year of George Orwell’s fictionally prophetic novel 1984.  Itlinked live transmissions from each of the artist’s locations across the United States, France and Germany, and illuminated the family rooms and faces of over 25 million viewers.

'TV Gardenimage via

That’s the short, short version of what Nam June Paik did to shift the digital arts landscape in the 20th century. And although his playful, sometimes satirical, sometimes reverent depictions of television and evolving forms of electronic communication have found their place in history, it’s worth taking a look at other Korean-based artists who are active in the digital arts world today in equally astonishing, innovative ways.

Jin-Yo Mok

“I want technology to become more simplified so we can understand better,” Jin-Yo Mok told The Creators Project in a 2013 feature profiling his works. “And I want to make more obvious art that doesn’t hold any secrets.”

In many of his works, these ideas present themselves by basing their functionality on interactions with the audience. Pieces like Sonic Column activate with lights and sounds to the viewer’s touch, while the Hyper-Matrix video installation he commissioned for Hyundai Motors tugs crowds into a sort of manageable vertigo as digital pistons manipulate a wall of styrofoam blocks into liquid form.

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Haru Ji

Artificial Nature 

Haru Ji’s research project for University of California Santa Barbara, Artificial Nature, has been appearing in a number of international galleries and exhibitions since it first debuted in 2008. As part of a collaboration with another UCSB alum Graham Wakefield, the installation “presents a programmed, self-sustaining, digital ecosystem as an immersive environment, with organisms that consume, grow, metabolize, reproduce and respond to activities within an endless fluid environment,” according to its website.

Mimi Son (Kimchi and Chips)

Mimi Son makes half of Kimchi and Chips, a Seoul-based art studio with a focus on digital mediums, alongside UK-bred media artist Elliot Wood (hence “Kimchi”, hence “Chips”). Installations such as Assembly and Lit Tree mimic and utilize natural formations to create stunning displays of layered, digital illuminations.

“Our work leads us to develop new tools and attain a new understanding of old ones, so that we can better create ideas and enable beautiful experiences for people living today,” says a headline on their site.

Do Ho Suh

Home Within Home Within Home Within Home Within Home

Do Ho Suh’s most recent installation, Home Within Home Within Home Within Home Within Home, shows the artist’s keen ability to allocate the precision of digital tools in favor of tangible installations relying on depth and space. Using a 3D scanning machine, the Korean-born artist created a life-size replica of the house he grew up in in South Korea, and tucked it within the belly of a life-size replica of the building he lived in when he first moved to the United States, to study at the Rhode Island School of Design.

In an age when we see video art via iPads and computer screen projections, it's almost like a nostalgic kick to go back to experimental installations displayed on TVs. We wonder what Nam June Paik would have created with a tablet…

Follow Johnny Magdaleno on Twitter: @johnny_mgdlno