Blog2: Creativity & Innovation: Nam Joon Paik

Nam Joon Paik

For my second blog post, I want to introduce the great artist Nam Joon Paik. I saw him in my text book for art class when I was 10 years old.

Nam Joon  Paik was a Korean American, a video artist, and a creator of video art genre. He was born in 1932 in Seoul, Korea and passed away in 2006. In his early life, he got trained as a pianist. In 1950s, because of Korean war, his family and him had to migrate to Japan. He studied art and music history in university of Tokyo in Japan, and then he went to Germany and studied The History of Music in Munich University. In addition, he participated in the art movement Fluxus, which was inspired by the musician John Cage. He created a lot of video artwork from 1960s to 90s such as ‘a cello’ and ‘TV garden’, and ‘Dadaiksun’, which means the more the better, appearing to be one of his most famous work, which was a huge tower made of 1003 monitors for the Olympic Games being held at Seoul in 1988. Also, the exhibition ‘the Worlds of Nam Joon Paik’, which was his work collection, was held at Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2000, and although he passed away in 2006, he was on the list of world’s 100 artists of the decade.

'Dadaiksun' The more the better

"Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life."

“On the one hand, a thing called art: on the other hand, a thing called communication. Sometimes, their curbs overlap. At their intersection, there is like an apple seed. This will be our theme… maybe our dream as well.”

I chose to write about Nam Joon Paik because he is one of my favourite artists and he is from Korea. (and I'm Korean.) Also, what he had done inspires me a lot and I admire how he lived his life with art. He tried to combine art, technology, and humanism. I think that is what all the artists and designers are supposed to be, these days. His work effects my design process as well because I had grown up with technology, and art around me that was inspired by him.




Image sources from:
http://www.paikstudios.com/ 


Article reference:
http://navercast.naver.com/contents.nhn?contents_id=5774&category_type=series