{"data":{"id":"986","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":986,"topgoose_id":998,"tms_id":986,"display_name":"Nam June Paik","sort_name":"Paik Nam June","display_date":"1932–2006","begin_date":"1932","end_date":"2006","biography":"\u003cp\u003e“I wanted to elevate television to an art\nform that was as highly valued as the music\nof Johann Sebastian Bach,” Nam June\nPaik once said. Born in Korea, Paik studied\ntwentieth-century music and composition\nin Japan and Germany before emerging in\nthe early 1960s at the forefront of a\ncritical exploration, through visual art, of the\nnew mass medium of television. \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/6139\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eMagnet\u003c/em\u003e\nTV\u003c/a\u003e is one of the pioneering works Paik made\nutilizing manipulated television sets. In this\ninstance he placed a strong magnet on\ntop of the monitor, where it interferes with\nthe electronic signal; this results in a\nseries of abstract patterns that form on the\nscreen as the magnet is moved. Paik thus\ntransformed the console into a participatory\nobject that subverts the one-way, linear\nflow of broadcast television.\n\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePaik, whose prolific experimentation\nalso encompassed closed-circuit\ninstallations and videotapes, began to\ncreate increasingly large, multimonitor\nsculptural installations in the 1980s.\u003cem\u003e\n\u003c/em\u003e\u003ca href=\"/collection/works/5459\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eV-yramid\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e, a ziggurat of forty television sets\nof decreasing size positioned atop\none another, was made for the artist’s\nretrospective at the Whitney Museum in\n1982. The kaleidoscopic, proto-music-video\nmontage that plays on the monitors is\nrecycled material from his single-channel\nvideos \u003cem\u003eGlobal Groove\u003c/em\u003e (1973) and \u003cem\u003eLake\nPlacid ’80 \u003c/em\u003e(1982). This footage was\nproduced with video effects generated by\nthe Paik-Abe synthesizer, a video-processing\nmachine Paik had developed with the\nJapanese engineer Shuya Abe in 1969.\nIn his work Paik embraced both pop culture\nand the artistic avant-garde; \u003cem\u003eV-yramid\u003c/em\u003e\nsimilarly draws a visual analogy between\nancient pyramidal architecture and\nmodern media technology.\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":true,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500118744","wikidata_id":"Q158056","created_at":"2017-08-30T16:02:27.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-04-24T01:34:03.583-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/986/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/986/exhibitions"}}}}