Image Art Pioneer White Nanking

As the father of video art recognized worldwide, Nam June Paik carried out a large number of experiments for the video art, expanding the new field of the video art, thus to create a new aesthetic pattern suitable for electronics and global communication era. At the same time, Nam June Paik was one of Asian artists first accepted by the western art i world, in his fight against mainstream culture form in Europe and America, his identity and role transformed from the destroyer and intruder to the enlarger and constructor. His art practice became the successful example of cross-cultural immigrant artists, and his works represented the weak culture, to enhance the influence of the Asian culture on the European culture, inject new speech acts for the western art world, and expand the diversified fields of the pioneering art.In this thesis, three important problems about the art career of Nam June Paik are mainly discussed. The first problem is the process that he transformed from the musician and composer to the video art and the influence of Fluxus group on him, which is the solid foundation for his way to a video art pioneer. The second problem is that he created large number of works after transforming to the video art, contributing the successful experience for the combination of cutting-edge technology and new artistic idea, to divide his works into video installation art and video art for respective analysis, thus to clarify the artistic characteristics and works’ ideological connotations of Nam June Paik. The third problem is the analysis of his process of building the identity in the western art world from the perspective of cross-culture combined with the immigrant experience and work creation of Nam June Paik based on two problems above. He became the most direct and most vital witness and practitioner in the world with experience under different cultural, religious and social background; the identity of the mobilized artist made him beyond the boundaries of the West and East, owning the new vision and different modes of thinking; the "Hybridity" and the diversification of identities in artworks of Nam June Paik created a unique "Third Space". In this paper, the research on the identity and the works creates the intertextuality, to enhance the subsequent scholars’ more comprehensive and further understanding of the art of Nam June Paik.