Nam June Paik

Born in Seoul in 1932, he trained as a classical musician before moving to West Germany in the late 1950s to study music history. Encountering John Cage and the Fluxus movement—which he joined in 1962—he redirected toward radical art, and in 1963 staged his debut exhibition at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, scattering distorted televisions across the gallery. Widely regarded as the founder of video art, his subsequent work—Global Groove (1973), TV Buddha (1974), TV Garden (1974–78)—established the moving image as a sculptural medium. He died in 2006.