The Influence of Shamanism on Nam June Paik’s Video Art

Abstract

Paik Nam-joon, who was born in Korea and became a world-renowned media artist, is the founder of video art and interactive art, and is a great artist who rewrote 21st century art history by introducing the concept of "Electrical Super Highway" to art in 1974. The basic style of Paik's work is to find intercultural and existential values that exist at the boundary between art and technology, present and past, East and West, chaos and order, and juxtapose it through various art media. Especially, the technique of comparing and juxtaposing the geographically and culturally confronted East and West will be a natural artistic manifestation for him who had left the country and lived a transnational life in Japan, Germany and America. This paper seeks to find the origin of Nam June Paik's transcendent artistic activity through the influence of Korean shamanism, seeking “the universality of art beyond boundaries” through the dialectical juxtaposition of the conflicts and tensions between cultures. Early elements such as Buddhism, Taoism, and Shamanism, borrowed from traditional Eastern philosophies, have been used as an important tool in Paik's art. This has provided the Western audience with the joy of exoticism, which is somewhat unfamiliar, and at the same time, has played a role in conveying the philosophical and ideological depths of Eastern culture that has been deployed with Western civilization that has relied on technological development. Especially, Korean shamanism has been utilized as a key element of Paik's art. Paik performs the role of Shaman himself by borrowing traditional Korean Kut through the performing arts, and frequently uses the Korean shaman rituals and symbols as the material of his single or multi-channel videos. The color of Black, White, Red, Blue, and Yellow, as well as the objects of Water, Fire, Wood, Metal, and Earth, which are frequently used in his video sculptures, represent the principle of Yin and Yang, the ideological foundation of Korean people. Nam June Paik has been ardently providing an exemplary way of incorporating Korean shaman culture into his art, while exquisitely displaying characteristics of the culture, and at the same time, blurring the boundaries between the national and international and the local and universal. Repeated performances of these shaman elements are not just the use of materials, but Nam June Paik's philosophy of art that attempts to sublimate the philosophical and cultural foundations of shamanism into art, and identify the role of an artist with shaman. Like shaman, who has played a role of a ‘medium’ who mediates the world of the dead and the living, the heaven and the earth, Nam June Paik shows the role and attitude of a global artist in breaking down the boundaries of art and technology, present and past, East and West, chaos and order, and seeking cross cultural and universal values of art.