In 1945, Nam June Paik went to Kyunggi High School in Seoul. At the same time, he took piano and composition lessons. In 1950, his family moved to Tokyo: there, he studied philosophy, music and the history of art, gaining a diploma in aesthetics and writing a thesis on Arnold Schönberg. He continued his training in Germany, at Munich and Cologne Universities, and then at the Freiburg Conservatory.

These years of training (1958-1963) were for him a time of decisive encounters and his first collaborations. Nam June Paik worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen at the WDR Electronic Music radio studio in Cologne. 1961 marked his meeting with George Maciunas, a founder of Fluxus, whose manifesto he fully espoused: he took part in Wolf Vostell's review De-coll/age and the first Fluxus festivals in Europe (concerts, performances and actions) with Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Robert Filliou, Allan Kaprow and George Brecht.

After working on the piano, a symbol of western culture, Paik began diverting the television from its conventional place, in collaboration with Vostell. In their performances and installations, the frame of the monitor was destroyed, demythifying the television set and depriving it of its traditional associations and connotations.

Electronic Music-Electronic TV, his first personal exhibition in March 1963 at the Parnass gallery in Wuppertal (Germany), presented his first musical and video works (Distorted TV: thirteen television sets showed the same programme in thirteen different versions, since Paik had developed thirteen different ways of electromagnetically deforming the picture).

Nam June Paik moved to New York in 1964. The same year, the Bonino Gallery offered him his first personal exhibition in New York: Electronic Art. With the Japanese sound engineer Shuya Abe, he built Robot K-456, the first robot to walk and talk.

A year later, when the portable Sony "portapak" video kit became available in America, he was the first to take advantage of this new tool, which he bought in October 1965. He then filmed Pope Paul VI's visit to New York through a taxi window and broadcast the recording (Electronic Video Recorder) the same evening at the Café à Gogo in New York. The technical novelty and the possibilities offered by this portable 1/2-inch video kit (live recording, autonomy of the production tool) led to creations and experiments with the medium. With Nam June Paik, a wave of video artists suddenly appeared who, by calling into question the communication codes of a society accustomed to the institutional style of television, proposed an alternative type of television.

In 1963-64, he met the cellist and composer Charlotte Moorman, with whom he began a long and fruitful collaboration. In their performances, he explored with her the body as a metaphor and extension of the musical instrument: "When two Americans like Charlotte and video make love, you can't miss it", Nam June Paik would later say. In 1967, with Opera Sextronique, they were arrested for indecency and involved in a sensational court case at the limit of artistic censorship. Other important works by them included TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969) and TV Cello (1971).

As early as 1963, Nam June Paik was already producing video installations and sculptures. His major pieces include: TV Clock (1963), Magnet TV (1965), Moon is the Oldest TV (1965-1976-1985), TV Buddha (1974), T V Garden (1974-1978), Fish Flies on Sky (1975) and Video Fish (1979-1985). In 1974, his first major personal retrospective, Video 'n' Videology, was organized at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse (New York, USA).

As artist in residence, Nam June Paik produced experimental works for the WNET / 13th Channel Television Laboratory in New York and, in 1969, for the first time on television, used the Paik / Abe video synthesizer developed with the electronic engineer Shuya Abe at the WGBH New Television Workshop in Boston (producer: Fred Barzyck). This process for manipulating and colouring images revolutionized the technological grammar of the medium.

Nam June Paik married the artist Shigeko Kubota in 1977. During the same period, alongside his interest for television as a medium and information technology, he began experimenting with satellite transmission. Documenta 6 in Kassel opened with a broadcast of a performance by Paik / Moorman and included TV Garden, an installation which would be seen in 1978 at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He was asked to work for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games at Lake Placid in 1980, producing a 4-minute video tape.

In 1982, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York organized a vast retrospective of his works which established Nam June Paik as one of the major artists of the 1970s.

On January 1st 1984, Nam June Paik, along with Joseph Beuys, Merce Cunningham and Allan Ginsberg, among others, greeted the new year with Good Morning Mr. Orwell (co-produced by the Centre Georges Pompidou, the WNET / 13th C hannel Television Laboratory and FR 3). This was one of the first programmes designed by an artist and transmitted live by satellite simultaneously in Europe, the United States and Korea. With his live satellite broadcasts (Good Morning Mr. Orwell, 1984, Bye Bye Kipling, 1986, Wrap Around the World, 1988), Nam June Paik created connections between the universe of art and that of the media, between popular culture and the avant garde, between technology and philosophical discussion and between East and West.

Starting in 1985, he devoted himself to constructing monumental installations and cybernetic totems made up of stacked monitors, thus perpetuating the spirit of Fluxus: he deconstructed and diverted the medium of television to demythify the language and content (Arc Double Face, 1985, La Madeleine Disco, 1989, Video Arbor, 1990). For the Seoul Olympics in 1988, he built The More the Better, a "media tower" made up of 1003 monitors.

Since the early days of his career, Nam June Paik has given considerable importance to collaborations with avant-garde artists like John Cage (A Tribute to John Cage, 1973), Merce Cunningham (Merce by Merce, 1978), Allen Ginsberg et Allan Kaprow (Allan' n' Allen's Complaint, 1982), Julian Beck and Judith Malina (Living with the Living Theatre, 1989), and Joseph Beuys (In Memoriam George Maciunas, 1978, MAJORCA-fantasia, 1989, Beuys / Voice, 1990).

In 1993, Electronic Superhighway from Venezia to Ulan-Bator was exhibited in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 1994, his video sculptures (Family of Robot : Mother and Father, Painted Metal Child, 1986, Aunt and Uncle, 1986-1988, etc.) were presented in the United States in an itinerant exhibition (Ft. Lauderdale Museum of Art, Ft. Lauderdale, and Holly Solomon Gallery, New York): The Electronic Superhighway : Nam June Paik in the Nineties.

Elisabeth Harter - Fabien Lagny