PROFILE: YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES

: : Hyunjin Shin

: : printable version  

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI) is an artist group founded in 1999 by Korean artist Young-Hae Chang as CEO (Central Executive Officer) and American artist Marc Voge as CIO (Central Information Officer). Rather than producing ships or heavy machinery as their name suggests, YHCHI make web-based artworks that combine and synchronize text and sound using flash animation.

For YHCHI the primary power of the internet is its ability to channel information across the globe through text-based documents. YHCHI have focused their attention on highlighting the ways in which the internet is used to disseminate ideologies that control and support dominant cultures.

Combining jazz soundtracks with textual monologues presented in rhythmic flashes, YHCHI have created a body of works that challenge the ways in which we interact with and understand the power of the web. Their first works, Samsung and Samsung Means to Come, for example, tell the story of a seemingly simple-minded housewife on a quest to learn how ‘to come’ with Samsung after she misreads the wording of a commercial on an LCD screen. ‘Samsung is great,’ she says, ‘Samsung tells us how to live.’ YHCHI has turned this woman’s story into an unconventional fiction that flashes before our eyes with unnerving speed.

In their current solo exhibition at the Rodin Gallery in the Samsung Museum of Art, YHCHI presented their most recent work, The Gates of Hell (2004) alongside the work of the same title by August Rodin in the museum’s lobby. Their mockery of the corporate-sponsored, consumer-driven lifestyle is made even more cutting as it is viewed on nine Samsung monitors set inside Zepel refrigerator doors, complete with internet connection.

YHCHI’s sarcasm does not stop at social issues, but goes on to politics, sex, religion, power and money. In Artist Statement No. 45,730,944: The Perfect Artistic Web Site and Perfect Victoria they use irony to question the meaningfulness of the media, even while mocking the very medium they rely on, the internet. Perfect Victoria, in particular, reinforces the tone of their criticism by borrowing the sound of a female voice prosthesis. Lotus Blossom, another example, mocks the jargon of art theory through a conversation that the narrator has with a Korean subway janitor who proposes ideas similar to those of Jacques Derrida.

As a web art group, they are in some ways typical of their chosen medium. Despite international recognition and their enormous impact on Korean contemporary art, the group keep a low profile. And while they often use real names in their works, such as Samsung and Kim Jong-il, the artists themselves remain largely anonymous and little information can be found about them other than a few exhibition catalogues.

In fact, the only the information that can be gathered about them is as follows. YHCHI were awarded the Webby Award, the internet’s equivalent of an Oscar, in the Fine Arts Category by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2001. They received a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts in New York. Their recent exhibitions include: Building the Unthinkable, Apex Art, New York (2004); Scream, Färgfabriken/Lövholmsbrinken, Stockholm (2004); Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo (2004); Facing: Korea - Demirrorized Zone, De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam (2003).

Hyunjin Shin is first curator at Ssamzie Space in Seoul.