Artist Link

Nam June Paik (July 20, 1932 - January 29, 2006) was a South Korean-born American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist.^[1] He is considered by some^[2] to have been the author of the phrase “Information Superhighway“, which, according to his own account, he used in a Rockefeller Foundation paper in 1974.

This artist has inspired me to look at working with video, I saw the Buddha watching TV during my visit to Berlin last week, and it helped me to think how I could use video to explain the concept of what I am trying to show in my art. 

 

Nam June Paik, «TV-Buddha», 1974
© Nam June Paik

 

 

 Nam June Paik
«TV-Buddha»

Paik’s possibly most famous video work was produced as a gap-filler for an empty wall in his fourth show in the Galeria Bonino, New York. Shortly before the opening, he hit upon the idea of making a TV viewer out of an antique Buddha statue once purchased as an investment. The subsequent addition of a video camera meant the Buddha now watched his videotaped image on the screen opposite – past and present gaze upon each other in an encounter between Oriental deity and Western media.
During the ‘Projekt ‘74′ exhibition in Cologne, Paik took the Buddha’s place in his recent creation, suggesting the implicit antithesis between transcendentalism and technology was equally present in his own personality.

 

 

 

~ by joanneleesesoulart01 on April 21, 2008.