From the perspective of artistic influence, Nam June Paik’s artistic popularity is comparable to that of Rauschenberg, who once exhibited in China. However, in the field of high-tech art, Paik’s artistic contribution is far greater than Rauschenberg. Although Lowe also vigorously promoted the cooperation between artists and scientists in the 1960s and established a national network such as the "Art and Technology Association", Rauschenberg was more of a social figure in this regard. An activist, Paik Nam-joon provided successful experience in unifying new technologies and new artistic concepts with a large number of works, leaving many classic works and influencing the development of international art in the 1980s and 1990s.

Nam June Paik was born in Seoul in 1932. He fled to Hong Kong with his parents when he was young, and later fled to Japan as a refugee. In 1956, he completed his studies in music, art history and philosophy at the University of Tokyo. Upon graduation, I completed a bachelor's thesis on Arnold Schoenberg. Because he received a Western-oriented music education in Japan, Bai Nanhuai was fascinated by Western classical music. In order to learn authentic Western music, he immediately came to the University of Munich in Germany to study music history and composition after graduation. In 1958, he met the American avant-garde musician John Cage who came to give lectures. From then on, his artistic career took a sudden turn.

In 1958, Paik met John Cage at a new music workshop held in Tamstadt, Germany. Beforehand, he had heard about this famous American avant-garde musician from his Japanese and German mentors, and learned that the master was very interested in Asian Zen thought and tried to introduce Zen thought into music creation. Bai Nanhuai was still skeptical about Cage at that time. Later, he described his dramatic change like this.

I listened to his music with a cynical attitude, and I was curious about how Americans treat their Eastern heritage. But during the concert my attitude changed and by the end of the concert I was a completely different person.

Paik was surprised to find that the same sense of boredom he got when listening to Cage's music was the same as what he felt when listening to lectures on Zen, such as the concept of "emptiness". Nam June Paik was inspired by Cage's music to revolutionize Western music. He wanted to give up the fear and worship of classical music that had been fostered by his years of Western education. It seems a bit strange that an American avant-garde musician influenced by Eastern ideas made a Korean who was well-studied in Western classical music realize the potential of his own cultural heritage, and thus joined Western avant-garde artists in rebelling against traditional Western classics and reshaping contemporary art. New vision, this is actually the spark of inspiration bursting out from cultural exchange and mutual penetration.

The "contingency" and "non-determinism" in Cage's music theory have a great influence on Paik. Secondly, this is also Paik's personal preference. Before meeting Cage, his German music teacher Wolfgang Fortner recommended Paik to the electronic music studio in Cologne because he discovered that Paik was fascinated by the combination of noise and sound. From the perspective of conventional composition, this kind of sound cannot be explained and composed into music. It is just like using the characteristics and aesthetic ideas of painting to explain the montage effect in movies, which is thankless. The Electronic Music Studio founded by Herbert Emmert was an important center for experimental music in the 1950s, attracting a large number of young European composers. This music studio in Cologne is equipped with a variety of electronic equipment that can synthesize sounds and music. It mainly explores the interpretability of various electronic music and emphasizes collaboration between writers. After Paik came to this music studio, he learned about the diversity of European contemporary art. Thus, the attitude of blind worship of Western classical music was gradually shaken. After being exposed to Cage's revolutionary music, he recognized the need to abandon the conservative ideas formed by his previous musical education. In 1959, Nam June Paik completed his revolutionary "action music" "Homage to John Cage". During the performance of the music, he threw eggs, broke glass, and smashed instruments. These actions are not intended to be flattering but to stimulate and shock the viewer/listener, and are distinct from Cage's efforts to "liberate sound," erasing and blurring the boundaries between music and performance. In 1961, Nam June Paik was invited by Stockhausen to participate in the performance of "Original" at the Cologne Cathedral Theater. At that time, critics had positioned Paik's "action music" creation as "cultural terrorism."

As the only performer in "Original", Paik performed works such as "Innocence" and "Zen Head". Stockhausen vividly recorded the scene of Paik's performance in his diary: "He ( Nam June Paik walked onto the stage calmly, but his actions shocked the audience like internal electricity. He withdrew a handful of soybeans into the air, and the beans fell into the audience again, causing commotions and boos. He wrapped his face in paper again, then gently crumpled the paper, and rubbed his eyes through the paper until the paper was wet with tears, and then he suddenly shouted and threw the paper to the audience.

Paik Nam June appeared on the stage as a musician, but his performance completely broke the audience's expectations. Some commentators believe that Paik's "action music" in the late 1950s and There was a certain connection with action painting, which was very popular in the field of visual arts at that time. However, action painting quickly declined in the early 1960s, and experimental music mixed with various noises evolved and spread all over the world with the support of electronic technology. The world's electronic pop music. However, the strong visual effects of Paik's "action music" drew him closer to the visual art world, thus joining the contemporary Fluxus artists who were popular in Europe and the United States to participate in the performance of "Original". At that time, Paik met Rolf Garin, a gallery owner who specializes in promoting the works of young experimental artists. Over the next two years, Paik and Rolf Garin have been preparing to hold "Action Music" at the gallery. "The possibility of a personal demonstration. At the same time, Paik secretly studied the introduction of television into artistic experiments. As an electronic musician, he dealt with wires, meters, amplifiers, and oscilloscopes all day long, and he gradually developed a taste for electronics. He had a strong interest in the interaction of sound and image, and he had a premonition of the potential power of new art to break the boundaries between different disciplines and art fields, so he hid in a little-known attic and, with the support of technical staff, started An experimental game that deconstructs television and its images·

With the support of Rolf Garin, Paik’s first solo exhibition was held in Garin’s own villa in March 1963. This is a very alternative exhibition. Not only does the exhibition venue use all spaces including the garden, the top floor and the kitchen, but many of the works are like electronic instruments or installations, with both sound and image, and the artist also invites the audience to listen actively participation, hands-on touch with the works, and what is even more special is that for the first time, televisions transformed by the artist are used as art materials and media in front of the audience.

The exhibition includes both music and television. Theme. The first theme consists of four pianos that were dismantled and then reassembled, two record players and records, an installation called "Chaotic Contact", and "Sound Body" composed of various sound-producing objects. ”, in addition to sound and visual installations located in specific rooms of the villa, such as a mannequin in a water-filled bath. The second theme consists of 11 black and white televisions placed in a living room. It was placed haphazardly on the floor without any sense of direction or sequence, but the same program was playing on all the TV screens. But the program was difficult to see clearly because the images on the screen were compressed into parallel lines, as if they were strongly compressed. Paik calls this work "Zen Television". This emphasis on the episodic effects of electronic images is clearly an extension of John Cage's notion of episodic music. This art exhibition, which seemed very avant-garde more than 30 years ago, was criticized by conservative critics at the time as a "kindergarten for Sundaism" and a "fun market." But today, this exhibition is considered a milestone in the history of video art, and it also established Paik’s art history status as the father of video art. It has a profound impact on the development of contemporary art. More and more avant-garde artists realize the importance of taking advantage of the convenient conditions and equipment brought by the development of science and technology, and continue to push art to the forefront of the times on the platform of technological progress. This understanding has a wide echo among China’s intellectual elite in the early 21st century. Art and scientific research conferences and exhibitions sponsored by Tsinghua University, although many commentators and artists’ understanding is still at the elementary level of illustrating scientific principles in the form of art. level. But after all, people see this new dimension of thinking about art.

In the early 1960s, Paik participated in the concerts, poetry readings and street performances of the European Fluxus artist group. At the same time, he met the American Fluxus artist Dick Higgins and others, which made Bai Nam June came to New York and joined the New York Fluxus artist group centered on George Maciunas.

Paik noticed that New Yorkers were far more tolerant of new technologies, new products, and innovative ideas than European cities. This gave him sufficient material and technical conditions to conduct new artistic explorations based on television installations. .

In 1965, he got a portable camera, which was still very rare at the time. He was as happy as a child who got a novel toy. He took it and took pictures on the streets of New York. Among them, he took a picture of a man on Park Avenue in New York. Several shots of the Pope. In the evening, I screened it at a coffee shop where artists often gather in New York. This was considered by some later scholars to be the first work of video art. In other works, Paik used the magnetization effect of magnets to deliberately distort the image on the TV screen or used an editing machine to change the TV picture according to his own intentions. In this way, he not only completed the TV sculpture installation by deconstructing and reorganizing the hardware of the TV, but also changed the image output of the TV and combined the image with the TV device (sculpture), thus creating the video installation. The most technical art form of its time. In the following decades of his artistic career, Nam June Paik has been working hard to explore the development space of video art, and has become a pivotal contemporary artist. His works are widely collected by major art museums around the world. For the 1988 Seoul Olympics, he was commissioned by the organizing committee to create the largest television installation, a 20-meter-high television tower composed of more than 1,000 televisions. Nam June Paik finally repaid his fellow countrymen with his art, and the artist himself also stole the show and became famous.