Korean-American artist Nam June Paik, widely regarded as the "father of video art," began paving the way for this art form in the 1960s. Nam June Paik was born into a wealthy family and studied classical piano since he was a child. However, after meeting Fluxus in Germany, he created a number of radical musical performance arts - he jumped off the stage at a piano concert and cut the audience's throat. tie, stopped playing and smashed the piano, a series of mischievous performance art that broke the traditional boundaries and artistic prejudices, just like a naughty boy jumped into the pool, stepped on it randomly, splashed water, and jumped into a brand new world.
Paik has been using "television" and "electronic video" as his creative language since then, launching his forty-year artistic adventure. He believes that through his musical training he might be particularly suited to the medium, "I think I understand time better than those video artists who come from painting and sculpture...because music is a manipulation of time, just as a painter understands abstract space, I Also understand abstract time” time is an integral part of video art, which must unfold over a period of time. Paik's art often uses or involves music and musical instruments. At the same time, he also deconstructs or combines television sets so that his video images become an integral sculptural configuration element.
Nam June Paik’s creations can be roughly divided into three clues: it is a body installation art formed by television and performance, mainly in cooperation with cellist Charlotte Moorman (Charlotte Moorman); the second kind is about exploring The human-machine relationship in the television cultural environment and the confusion brought about by technological products on people's living conditions; in the first two types of art, Paik focuses on "meaning". In the third type of art that began in the 1980s, he Then focus on "form" instead. During this period he created a large number of landscape-style giant television installations and anthropomorphic sculptures.
"Art and technology are important tools for human connection."
"Just like nature, it is beautiful, not because it changes beautifully, but because it changes ”
What he was after was uncertainty - an image produced by chance -
He discovered that the behavior of electrons in color televisions was indeed uncertain
of. Paik describes his primary medium as a "video pile" - disparate images from seemingly infinite sources that he constantly combines and re-edits, poeticizing the ways in which technology connects a heterogeneous planet. potential.
"To be able to overcome it, one has to know the technology very well. [The purpose of video art] is to liberate people from the tyranny of television (and its images).