Nam June Paik in one of his installations, as seen in Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV (Greenwich Entertainment)

The Korean-born artist Nam June Paik has been described as the “foremost video artist in the world” and “the father of video art.” Appropriately, filmmaker Amanda Kim’s documentary tribute to Paik is visually vibrant. Besides an abundance of the artist’s visual work, Kim plows through her subject’s time line with a wide array of interviews and archival clips. If the viewer isn’t already familiar with Paik, they are in good hands. For those who have followed his career as an artist based in New York’s Soho, there is something new for them here as well. 

Unlike many artist bio docs, this one leans more toward the work as opposed to armchair analysis. Paik grew up during the Japanese occupation of Korea and was from a well-to-do—what he decried as “corrupt” —family, and he rebelled early on against his father by becoming a 13-year-old Marxist. He spoke 20 languages, though badly according to art collector Holly Solomon, and he could have become a concert pianist; music was his ticket out of his war-torn country. (Executive producer Steven Yeun, Oscar-nominated for Minari, reads from Paik’s writings.) 

What might be less known about Paik are his early years in 1950s Germany, where he lived for seven years. He first attended music school in Munich before dropping out. The turning point of his career was his 1957 discovery of the radically mischievous avant-garde music of John Cage (Variations II). It had so much impact that Paik drew a line through his life: BC for Before Cage, AC for afterwards. Cage gave him the freedom to experiment, beginning with music, and he became part of the German art scene that was smashing taboos and planting the seeds for the art explosion of the 1960s. This included joining the DIY interdisciplinary Fluxus movement, which included filmmaker Jonas Mekas and Yoko Ono, that was set on purging the world of what they called the “Europanism” in art. Fun fact: For Paik’s U.S. residency application in 1964, Mekas became his financial sponsor, though he, like Paik, was broke. 

In New York City, Paik began to explore another medium: “I wanted to talk back to television.” Kim’s film takes its subtitle from his 1965 exhibition Moon Is the Oldest TV, in which a group of TV monitors all display a close-up of the solitary moon in ghostly black-and-white. Among many inventions, he constructed a TV bra that was worn by his frequent collaborator Charlotte Moorman, who became famous as the “topless cellist” in one of his performance pieces.

Paik is also lauded for having optimistically envisioned the world wide web, although it might be more appropriate to say that what he foresaw was the explosion of cable television. In the 1970s, he imagined that there would be countless television channels from all around the world beaming to an international audience, making the TV Guide as thick as the New York City phone book.

The camera doesn’t linger too long on any one work, but enough of it flashes by for viewers to get more than a sense of what he was conveying. Perhaps the best or well-known example of his style is his influence on music videos. For those of a certain age who remember when MTV played videos around the clock, they will travel back in time upon seeing the Paik-like video art unleashed in Prince’s “When Doves Cry” and the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” But you can’t blame the artist for all of the cheesy visual effects of the 1980s. Paik’s are classier, less flamboyant, and otherworldly in many instances. His videos, performance art, and instillations are an example of wonkiness made accessible, if not playful.

Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV joins an eclectic group of profiles highlighting the art scene of post-1950s New York, such as the artistic progress of choreographer Merce Cunningham in Cunningham (2019), who also danced with multiple versions of himself in a video directed by Paik, and Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground. Like Haynes, Kim relies on contemporaneous and archival interviews of those who were actually in her subject’s orbit. Adding more than a touch of class to her documentary is Ryuichi Sakamoto’s elegant theme music.