The Father of Video Art

Mr. Nam June Paik's art has always been based on the theme of "communication between art and life". As a member of the Fluxus movement, Mr. Paik's performance art is a combination of music and drama, or musical and non-musical acts. His artworks free the audience from the position of passively listening to the sound of the art and make the audience part of the work, thus giving the audience a more intense and direct impact.

Mr. Nam June Paik's first video artwork shows us a series of images selected from television programs by using magnets close to the cathode ray tube of a monitor and by applying the distorting effect of an image signal converter. This work deconstructs the mass media and one-way communication of television. This style continues in Mr. Paik's subsequent works. Mr. Paik uses closed-circuit television systems to guide the viewer through their own real-time images. He uses portable video recording equipment to broadcast the recorded images to the viewer while recording on the move. This method of creation dissolves the viewer's reaction into the artwork itself. The solo exhibition organized by Duarte China Gallery focuses on Nam June Paik's video sculptures from the 1980s and 1990s. His series of "TV Experiments", made in the 1960s, in which he transformed television images into new images through a video signal converter, his performance photographs made in the 1970s with Charlotte Moorman (1963-1975)***, and his Swiss Clock (1988), which utilized a closed-circuit television system, are also included in the exhibition. The video sculpture "New York" is also on display. The video sculptures Newton (1991) and Darwin (1991) will also be exhibited. This is the first time these two works are shown in Asia.

Young artists active in China's modern art scene are actively expanding their imagination and making different attempts. Mr. Nam June Paik's solo exhibition is of great significance as the second exhibition at Duarte China Gallery.

Mr. Paik has taught us that we can win by following the rules of the game, and we can win by changing the rules of the game (Chosun Diary, August 15, 1992, Korea), so let's follow the footsteps of this talented, never-say-die artist in the garden of video art he has constructed to create a different kind of life. Nam June Paik was born in 1949 in Odessa, Ukraine, and lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany.

The former curator of the neue galerie (Graz, Austria), professor at the Hochschule fur Angewandte Kunst (Vienna, Austria), commissioner of the Venice Biennale in Pavillon, Austria, and director of the Institut fur Neue Medien (Frankfurt, Germany).

Since 1999 he has been President of the ZKM Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie (Karlsruhe, Germany). Nam June Paik is an exemplary Surge artist. He was a core member of the most important avant-garde arts that emerged after 1945 - the music avant-garde, the film avant-garde, the performance avant-garde and the media avant-garde. Underlying all activities was his keen interest in analog and digital technologies.

Many of the ideas put forward by the Radicals, following the example of Dadaism and Futurism, became prevalent in the second half of the 20th century:

1. redefining genres and media by merging music and movement, machine and human body, painting and music, sculpture and painting, theatre and dance, and poetry and technology;

2. realizing the intersection of all types of art and the intersection of art and The intersection of the arts and of art and life;

3. Audience participation and action direction;

4. The use of electronic media;

5. New methods (e.g., programming), media (e.g., television), and materials (e.g., the microchip). This ambitious redefinition has led to the emergence of conceptual art, electronic music, video art, extended cinema, movement art, body and performance art, satellite television, installation art, environmental art, performance art, procedural art, and instructional art.

Looking back at Mr. Nam June Paik's illustrious career, we can see that he has been involved in all aspects of Surge art, and that his work has taken on many forms of artistic fusion that are unparalleled among Surge artists. He combines music and movement, new materials and media, technology and the human body. He combines sculpture with electronic images and invites the audience to participate. Compared to Beuys, Nam June Paik is the central activist of the Surge artists. Nam June Paik himself is more closely aligned with the ideas of the Surge.

Boyce was interested in mythology and was obsessed with reinterpreting traditional intergenerational materials, whereas Nam June Paik was interested in new materials such as electronic devices, media, and mutant technological artifacts. Boyce honed his ego, and Brannon Guidelines nurtured the masses. While Beuys was a material mystic, Brennan Guidelines was a media mystic. The musical and movement works he created in the 1960s are legendary and can be considered the centerpiece of the European and American avant-garde. Most of his peers could not keep up with the next step in this artistic movement, namely media art. But Nam June Paik was the first to realize that musical instruments changed not only the sound, but also the use of music.

So in 1963, in the historic exhibition "Interpretation of Music - Electronic Television," he exhibited electronic musical instruments as sculptures as well as as part of an entire work. Since then, Nam June Paik's artistic expression has included media in addition to music, and in addition to the piano, he has created works with the help of electronic synthesizers.

In 1965, he held his first solo exhibition in the United States, which was named "Electronic Art". We can see from this that Nam June Paik consciously shifted from electronic music to electronic art. His extensive creative experience and understanding of electronic music (in collaboration with Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage) made him realize the significance of the upcoming era of electronic art.

At the time, he alone was aware of the shift from music to visuals, from sound synthesis to image synthesis, and the theme of his 1963 solo exhibition clearly expressed this shift from electronic music to electronic media. This was the decisive moment that opened the door to a new era, the era of electronic media art, of which Namco Paik was a pioneer. One of his major artistic achievements was precisely the shift from musical instruments to media installations. In addition, he shifted the subject matter of his work from electronic music to electronic media, interpreting and expressing free will theory, mutability, participation and openness.

In 1963, he wrote that "while nondeterminism and variability have been the primary issues in music for nearly a decade, they are incomplete parameters in Op Art." As a result, he focused his energies on instrumental parts, programmed parts of electronic music, and thrash music, opening up a unique field of media art by introducing television and video installations. At the same time he always remembered and often referred to his predecessors Wolf Vostell (Wolf Vostell) and K.O. G?tz (K-O Goetz).

Through a series of fast-paced activities, he finally developed a framework for media art in the 1960s and, most importantly, introduced the world to the video installation genre that conquered the art world in the 1990s. Beginning with the multi-monitor installation TV Cross (1966), which transformed the television image (1967), he completed works such as Robot K-456 (1964) and the later Paik/Abe Synthesizer (1970).

In 1965, he had another major solo exhibition in New York, Nam June Paik: Cybernetics, Art and Music (Electronic Television, Color Television Experiment, Three Robots, Two Zen Boxes + One Zen Jar).

This solo exhibition documents Nam June Paik's process of making media and instruments, musical art and visual art, Zen Buddhism and Western electronic consumer culture one and the same, which should become the "brand," Nam June Paik's future trademark. This photograph of Nam June Paik working in his studio in New York in the mid-1860s shows us that the artist is indeed in the footsteps of the masters Lizinsky and László Moholy-Nagy. Moreover, as early as the 1860s, he had already proposed a central feature of all future media installations: public participation. His work "Interactive Television I" (1963-1966) became the premier work of participatory and interactive art practice in the decades that followed.

In his article "On Musical Exhibitions," published in the third issue of Décollage in 1962, Beuys wrote, "It's not clear what I want to do next, but I want to let the audience (or in this case, the congregation) perform for themselves! ". The shift to "audience participation" was accompanied by a shift from music to television and video.

Already in 1973, he recognized that the wave of globalization was making videotape a "global pleasure". The opening line of the description of "global enjoyment" was: "This is just a glimpse of the future of video, when you'll be able to switch to any television station on the planet, and when viewing guides will be as ubiquitous as the phone book in Manhattan. "

In 1984, he made the worldwide satellite broadcast of "Good Morning, Mr. Orville" a reality. As we've seen, as early as 1974, Nam June Paik dreamed of evolving television into a two-way mode of communication, not just a one-way channel of messaging.

In 1974, the Rockefeller Foundation commissioned Nam June Paik to write a paper titled "Media Planning for a Post-Industrial Society".

The paper advocated connecting Los Angeles and New York with "electronic highways, home satellite broadband communication networks, coaxial cables, and fiber optics".

In 1993, he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale and named his installation "Electronic Highway". It was a reminder that he had anticipated the idea that President Bill Clinton had been proposing since 1992.

In 1995, the U.S. government finally made President Clinton's plan for an electronic information superhighway a reality. In addition, Nam June Paik accurately foresaw the birth and development of the World Wide Web. Nam June Paik is not only the founder of media art, but also a prophet. In this sense, he is similar to Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan was more of a Wall Street and Manhattan media man, popular with the print media because he opened their eyes to the significance and importance of new media.

Nam June Paik is more of a metaphysical media personality, popular with the mass media and the art world because he opens their eyes to the meaning and significance of new media. Nam June Paik's deep insights into the media allowed him to predict its future vision decades in advance.

His creativity is partly a result of his prophetic ability. His work encompasses all artistic disciplines, such as dance, theater, painting, literature, and sculpture, and he uses a wide variety of media and instruments to create works that span a wide range of subjects, from the importance of cosmology to the realities of everyday life.

Not only that, Nam June Paik's art bridges religions and continents on a global level, improving our perception of space and time. Zen, as a religion that is hidden in secular life, helps Nam June Paik to understand the true meaning of techniques in daily life, so he can realize the intersection of religious activities and daily life.

Thus, we can say that he merged religious art (Buddhism is a religion that permeates secular life) with radical art (radical art is an art of everyday life). In order to build this bridge, he needed to understand the nature of technology: the technology of God.

Every technology is a technology of the divine, and every technology has religious implications. Perhaps transforming our world through media is at the center of Nam June Paik and his media metaphysics.