[3] Born in Seoul to a wealthy business family, Paik trained as a classical musician, spending time in Japan and West Germany, where he joined the Fluxus collective and developed a friendship with experimental composer John Cage.

His father [ko], who in 2002 was revealed to be a Korean who collaborated with the Japanese during the latter's occupation of Korea, owned a major textile manufacturing firm.

[4]: 19 [6] While studying in Germany, Paik met the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage and the conceptual artists Sharon Grace, George Maciunas, Joseph Beuys, and Wolf Vostell.

[11]: 158 [12] Curator John Hanhardt observed that certain works recall Paik's lived experience of transnational immigration from South Korea to Japan, Germany, and on the U.S.; one example is Guadalcanal Requiem (1977), which invokes "the history and memories of World War II in the Pacific.

[7]: 135 Nam June Paik then began participating in the Neo-Dada art movement, known as Fluxus, which was inspired by the composer John Cage and his use of everyday sounds and noises in his music.

[20] Throughout this period it was Paik's goal to bring music up to speed with art and literature, and make sex an acceptable theme.

"[21] Of the "Playable Pieces," the only one actually to have been performed was by Fluxus composer Joseph Byrd ("Cut your left forearm a distance of ten centimeters.")

[24] In 1974 Nam June Paik used the term "super highway" in application to telecommunications, which gave rise to the opinion that he may have been the author of the phrase "Information Superhighway".

[25] In fact, in his 1974 proposal "Media Planning for the Postindustrial Society – The 21st Century is now only 26 years away" to the Rockefeller Foundation he used a slightly different phrase, "electronic super highway":[26]

Assuming we connect New York with Los Angeles by means of an electronic telecommunication network that operates in strong transmission ranges, as well as with continental satellites, wave guides, bundled coaxial cable, and later also via laser beam fiber optics: the expenditure would be about the same as for a Moon landing, except that the benefits in term of by-products would be greater.Also in the 1970s, Paik imagined a global community of viewers for what he called a Video Common Market which would disseminate videos freely.

[27] In 1978, Paik collaborated with Dimitri Devyatkin to produce a light hearted comparison of life in two major cities, Media Shuttle: New York-Moscow on WNET.

[citation needed] During the New Year's Day celebration on January 1, 1984, he aired Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, a live link between WNET New York, Centre Pompidou Paris, and South Korea.

As the curator Suh Jinsuk has observed, after returning to Korea in 1984, Nam June Paik increasingly explored symbols of global exchange with Asia, such as the Silk Road and Eurasia.

Broadcast on the occasion of the Asia Games in Seoul, Bye Bye Kipling's title referenced a poem by Rudyard Kipling, "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet," as it fostered collaborations such as between the American artist Keith Haring and the Japan-based fashion designer Issey Miyake.

[35] For the German pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale, Paik created an array of robot sculptures of historic figures, such as Catherine the Great and the legendary founder of Korea, Dangun, so as to emphasize the connections between Europe and Asia.

[7]: 135 Paik's 1995 piece Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, is on permanent display at the Lincoln Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Despite his stroke, in 2000, he created a millennium satellite broadcast entitled Tiger is Alive and in 2004 designed the installation of monitors and video projections Global Groove 2004[37] for the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin.

[39] Paik's first exhibition, entitled "Exposition of Music – Electronic Television", was held in 1963 at Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany.

[41] This coincided with a downtown gallery showing of video artworks by his wife Shigeko Kubota, mainly dealing with his recovery from a stroke he had in 1996.

[7]: 6 [11]: 152  This exhibition later travelled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where it was presented at the first West-coast retrospective of Paik's work from May 8, 2021, through October 3, 2021.

The archive includes Paik's early writings on art history, history and technology; correspondence with other artists and collaborators like Charlotte Moorman, John Cage, George Maciunas and Wolf Vostell; and a complete collection of videotapes used in his work, as well as production notes, television work, sketches, notebooks, models and plans for videos.

It also covers early-model televisions and video projectors, radios, record players, cameras and musical instruments, toys, games, folk sculptures and the desk where he painted in his SoHo studio.

"[91] Hanhardt describes the archives in the catalog for the 2012 Smithsonian show in the book Nam June Paik: Global Visionary.

This led to TV Buddha and people's model of the internet as we know it today with such art pieces as "Send / Receive".

The artwork and ideas of Nam June Paik were a major influence on late 20th-century art and continue to inspire a new generation of artists.

Contemporary artists considered to be influenced by Paik include Christian Marclay, Jon Kessler, Cory Arcangel, Ryan Trecartin and Haroon Mirza.

[43] Nam June Paik's work was first screened in South Korea on March 20, 1974, at the United States Information Center in Seoul.

[94]: 196 Christie's holds the auction record for Paik's work since it achieved $646,896 in Hong Kong in 2007 for his Wright Brothers, a 1995 propeller-plane-like tableau comprising 14 TV monitors.