By Park Chung-a
Staff Reporter

World-famous Korean-born video artist Paik Nam-june, who first realized the potential for video as an artist’s medium, died on Sunday night, his family announced. He was 74.
Paik died peacefully of natural causes around 8 p.m. at his apartment in Miami, Florida, while being watched by his Japanese-American wife Shigeko Kubota and a nurse, they said. According to Paik’s nephew Ken Paik Hakuta, his funeral will be held at the Frank E. Campbell funeral chapel on Madison Avenue in New York within a few days.

Local artists have expressed shock and deep grief over his passing

``He was a lonely person. We lost a great artist. His art will last in history forever,’’ said Lim Young-bang, a former director of National Museum of Contemporary Art who organized the artist’s large exhibition to mark his 60th birthday in 1992. ``Thanks to Paik, there has been a great progress of visual media. He showed that art can be a means to bring about development of civilization.’’

An art critic Lee Yong-woo, said Paik played a pivotal role in raising the status of Korean art withn the international art community. ``Paik pioneered video art and gave a new insight to technology by humanizing it,’’ he said.

In a recent poll, Paik was chosen the second most influential figure in the local art world following Hong Ra-hee, the president of Leeum museum under the wing of Samsung Group, the world’s largest memory chipmaker.

Paik brought to the world many questions and warnings about the passive acceptance of television.

Born in Seoul in 1932, Paik was first a musician. He studied music history, art history and philosophy at the University of Tokyo, where he graduated with a dissertation on Arnold Schoenberg. He went to Germany in 1956 to continue studying music history at the University of Munich. In Germany, he met composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, who inspired Paik to go into electronic art. Until 1961, he worked as a video artist in the electronic music studio Radio Cologne.

He made his art world debut in 1963 with a solo art exhibition titled ``Exposition of Music-Electronic Television.’’

Paik is also known as a member of the Fluxus movement _ a loosely related group of artistic rebels including Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono and John Cage, which in the 1960s wanted to not only transform art, but also the definitions of music, dance, poetry and theater. Paik’s ``Tribute to John Cage’’ (1973) involved a stage-set presenting a chaotic jumble of sounds, video images and a chicken.

Park had been internationally renowned as a pioneer of video art since the 1960s. He is famous for his constructions with numerous TV sets that comment on the meaning of the medium and how we see the world through it. Work titles include ``Video Buddha,’’ (1976) ``Real Fish/Live Fish’’ (1982) and many variations on odd-looking robots made of TVs, including one that may defecate.

Despite being partially paralyzed and wheelchair-bound after suffering a stroke in 1996, he continued to pursue his active career as an artist by participating in various events such as the German Video Sculpture exhibition (1997), Art Basel (1997), Seoul Engraving Festival (1998) and Retrospective Exhibition at Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California (2000).

A museum dedicated to the artist, his life and work, is to be built by late 2007 in Yongin city, Kyonggi Province, under the direction of the Kyonggi Culture Foundation.

michelle@koreatimes.co.kr