Nam June Paik is one of the most fascinating figures of the neo-avant-garde. Born in 1932 in Seoul, in what is now South Korea, Paik immigrated with his family in 1942, first to Hong Kong and later to Japan, escaping the Korean War and returning to his country of birth only decades later. At the University of Tokyo, he studied music, aesthetics, and art history, read Hegel in German, and focused his musicology thesis on Arnold Schoenberg. He made Germany his European home and remained attached to it through his professorship at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1979–96) even after he had moved to New York City in 1964.

Paik exhibited considerable versatility throughout his long artistic career. One of the most prolific multimedia artists of the second half of the twentieth century, he produced single video works, monumental video walls and multimonitor installations, robotic experiments and video synthesizers, satellite projects, and performances. Among the distinctive features of Paik’s work are the use of found objects, the technique of bricolage, action and performance, and the guiding principles of chance and randomness. The rise of digital technology has made Paik’s immensely rich creative output highly relevant for the many inquiries into the status of media, their reinterpretation, authorship, curation, and dissemination, including questions regarding art and culture in general.