(b Seoul, 20 July 1932). South Korean video artist, performance artist, musician, sculptor, film maker, writer and teacher, active in Germany and the USA. From 1952 to 1956 he studied music and aesthetics at the University of Tokyo. In 1956 he moved to the Federal Republic of Germany: he studied music at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universit?t, Munich, and worked with the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen at Darmstadt, before joining FLUXUS, with whom he made performance art, experimental music and 'anti-films' (e.g. the imageless Zen for Film, 1962). His Neo-Dada performances in Cologne during this period included a celebrated encounter with John Cage, during which he formed a lasting friendship with the avant-garde composer by cutting off his tie. Inspired by Cage's 'prepared piano', in which the timbre of each note was altered by inserting various objects between the strings, Paik's experiments from 1959 with television sets, in which the broadcast image was modified by magnets, culminated in his seminal exhibition Exposition of Music
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