Nam June PAIK The elements 1989 Lacquer cabinet, six TV sets with laser discs, roots, three silk flowers and three glass beakers 195 x 126 x 65cm The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art Purchased 1999 with funds from the Sidney Myer Centenary Celebration 1899-1999 Gift through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Reproduced with permission

Nam June PAIK

b. 1932, South Korea/ United States

Nam June Paik is a senior artist who has played a pioneering role in the development of video, new media and multimedia art. Paik has radically developed and altered the understanding and perception of sound, performance and multimedia as artforms over the past fifty years and continues to make a major contribution to these media. Paik’s interest in sound began early when he studied music, art history and aesthetics at university and wrote his dissertation on the atonal work of Arnold Schoenberg. His contact with John Cage in 1958 emerged as a turning point for both their careers. Paik revels in the modern and current developments in information technology and new media. He has elaborated and celebrated this potential through a continuing and expanded body of work, notably those utilising electronic and mass media networks such as television, which are referred to by Paik as the ‘electronic super highway’. Nam June Paik was born in 1932 in Seoul, lived in Germany from 1956 and has lived in New York since 1964.