Katryna Hinkley

Art History Paper

The art installation is entitled TV Buddha by Nam Jun Paik which was initially displayed in 1974. This
piece could be apart of multiple movements including contemporary art, installation art, and video art.

Nam Jun Paik is a Korean American artist who was born July 20, 1932 in Seoul, South Korea. At a young
age, he was trained as a classical pianist. In 1950, his family fled Korea due to the Korean war and they
ended up in Hong Kong, Japan. Paik attended the University of Tokyo and graduated in 1956 with a
Bachelor of Arts in Aesthetics. Music seemed to be a huge part of his life, and he originally found himself
in performance art. Paik lived and worked in multiple places including Japan, Germany, and the United
States.

Paik is known as “the father of video art” because of his experimentation with video. Some of his
experiments included displaying abstract forms on a television, and then using a magnet to distort the
display (1963). He also was the first to use a small portable video camera (1965). Paik coined the term
“electronic superhighway” which described what he saw the future of technology would be – allowing
people across the globe to connect with no boundaries. His exploration of technology and video laid the
groundwork for new media artists today.

TV Buddha is culturally significant to this period because it highlights the differences between Eastern
and Western art, as well as modern or futuristic artwork to historical. I also see a question at play with
this artwork; is an artwork on a screen as impactful as it is in person? What are you missing and gaining
when looking at a screen? This is a question that is still relevant today. Paik inspired multiple artists then
and today to explore new media arts. He showed what technology can bring into the art world.

Paik’s work, including TV Buddha would be relevant to any class using new media. Something I heard at
last year’s AEM/WAEA conference was that an elementary classroom was taught stop motion and
created stop motion animation with their iPads. I think that a project could be to animate something
from your own culture, family, or tradition, that isn’t related to technology or screens (a theme that is
taken from TV Buddha). The film would only have to be about 10-15 seconds.

I think that the fact that TV Buddha uses technology is a lot more relatable to kids than an old painting. A
lot of times digital arts gets left out of art history (which I find frustrating because I love learning about
this stuff and it’s hard to find). I think you can introduce it by asking students if they’ve seen technology
in art history before. If they say yes, we can talk about examples. If they say no, we can have a discussion
about technology being relatively new, but digital art is a part of art history.

https://publicdelivery.org/nam-june-paik-tv-buddha/

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/paik-nam-june/

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/nam-june-paik-biography-and-career-timeline/27383/

https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.5145.html

https://americanart.si.edu/research/paik/biography

https://www.moma.org/artists/4469

https://www.paikstudios.com/

https://walkerart.org/collections/artists/nam-june-paik