YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES
APT9
Established 1999 Seoul, South Korea
Located in Seoul, South Korea
YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES is a collaboration between artist and translator Young-Hae Chang and poet Marc Voge. Best known for their satirical text-only web videos set to funk, jazz and soul soundtracks, they draw on concrete poetry, arthouse cinema and the short story form to tell heavily ironic tales of contemporary paranoias. Much of their practice has focused on the contradictions of Korean life, from the peninsula’s abiding Cold War division to the extraordinary cultural and political influence of its famous conglomerates. After producing several viral hits in 2003, the duo made the shift to screening their videos on a larger scale in gallery spaces and other physical sites while maintaining their extensive and ever-growing website. Their work has been produced in more than 20 languages and shown in major museums around the world.
YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES / South Korea, Est 1999 / CRUCIFIED TVS – NOT A PRAYER IN HEAVEN 2018 (detail) / Five-channel video: 16:9, black and white, sound, 3:00 minutes / © and image courtesy: The artists
In the form of a crucifix, CRUCIFIED TVS – NOT A PRAYER IN HEAVEN 2018 draws attention to the physicality of LCD screens, a form perfectly suited to the simple combination of five 16:9 aspect ratio screens. The creation of YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, this installation highlights the flattening of digital screens in our contemporary world. Mimicking the way that crucifixes are often suspended from church ceilings, CRUCIFIED TVS responds to the architecture of the contemporary art museum – a public, secular place designed for people to gather and reflect.
The text in the flash animation recounts a narrative of doors being busted down and people being pushed by force into the street, as neighbours watch on. The swapping between ‘I’, ‘YOU’, and ‘WE’ in the text onscreen makes it difficult to identity which parties may be the victims and which are the protagonists – multiple sides of history are presented. The repetition of words across the screens also recalls the cyclical feeds of online news reporting, while the violent scenes described in the text are at odds with the dulcet sounds of the bossa nova soundtrack, a popular Brazilian mix of jazz and samba.
