Pioneering media and performance artist, Nam June Paik, passed away on January 29, 2006. I had seen his work most recently at the 2004 Gwangju Biennale. The art community has lost one of the 20th centuries most influential and pivotal artists. No artist working in video cannot acknowledge his influence.

Paik's journey as an artist has been truly global, and his impact on the art of video and television has been profound.To foreground the creative process that is distinctive to Paik's artwork, it is necessary to sort through his mercurial movements, from Asia through Europe to the United States, and examine his shifting interests and the ways that individual artworks changed accordingly. It is my argument that Paik's prolific and complex career can be read as a process grounded in his early interests in composition and performance. These would strongly shape his ideas for mediabased art at a time when the electronic moving image and media technologies were increasingly present in our daily lives. In turn, Paik's work would have a profound and sustained impact on the media culture of the late twentieth century; his remarkable career witnessed and influenced the redefinition of broadcast television and transformation of video into an artist's medium.

John Hanhardt
Guggenheim Museum of Art
Senior Curator of Film and Media Arts

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Nam June Paik