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| Nam June Paik |
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Nam June Paik was an artist who was quite ahead of his time. Some referred him as the father of video art. Paik was born in Seoul, Korea in 1932. His early interest was music but with a fortunate luck, he met up with John Cage and George Maciunas. He then found the Happening and Fluxus. From then he start to take on interest in art. By 1963, he has his first art piece up,
TV Clock. His fascination about television led him to spend the rest of his life creating video arts.
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| TV Clock, 1963 |
He transformed from his early works that deals with only a single straight line on 24 black and white televisions to dealing with 1003 televisions with full color display playing different things at different time. His most renowned work was the Electronic Superhighway in 1995.
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| Electronic Superhighway (313 TVs) |
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| The More the Better, 1988 (1003 TVs) |
In 1984, he was the first one to do live satellite installation work. It was called Good Morning Mr. Orwell. The piece refers to a book from 1949 written about 1984. The book talks about Mr. Orwell's dystopian. The community where free will and privacy and taken away by all the surveillance and mind control. I linked the video down below. Enjoy!
Your presentation brought forth how NJP's works kept getting larger and larger and more and more absurd (e.g. "The More the Better"). He walks the line between joke art and making something that could be as easily at an amusement park. But perhaps art museums have become amusement parks!
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