"Nam June Paik endeavors to humanize technology and electronic media, a pursuit evident throughout his prolific, complex, and visionary career. He champions technology’s powerful potential to foster interactivity within our increasingly global society. Paik’s writings of nearly 40 years ago demonstrate his prescient awareness of the significance of TV, satellites, and rapid interactive communication well before advances in computer technology and the creation of the Internet. Paik recognized that TV’s pervasiveness renders it almost invisible; he sought to create alternatives to TV’s capacity to lull, to entertain, and to make passive consumers of its audience. He set out as an artist to demystify the medium, and in doing so, he transformed the video image into a tool capable of redefining the parameters of sculpture and installation art.

Paik’s defining contribution is undeniable, now that the art of the moving image—video and media art—is endemic, informing our understanding of the visual arts in this new century. While some new media artists seem primarily concerned with the optical components within a pictorial space, Paik embraces the materiality as well as the more ephemeral nature of technology. Maintaining careful control over the images he selects, Paik meticulously edits an amalgam of pulsating visual images, then contains those images within a fabricated or reappropriated shell, as though he were creating a physical body to house the complexity of the soul." -Sculpture.org

Nam June Paik, (b. 1932) originated from Seoul, Korea. "Major retrospectives of Paik's work have been organized by Kölnischer Kunstverien (1976), Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1978), Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1982), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1989), Kunsthalle Basel (1991), National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul (1992), and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2000). His work also appeared in important group exhibitions such as São Paulo Biennale (1975), Whitney Biennial (1977, 1981, 1983, 1987, and 1989), Documenta 6 and 8 (1977 and 1987), and Venice Biennale (1984 and 1993). From 1979 to 1995 Paik served as department chair at Staatliche Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf. Paik died in Miami in 2006." -The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation