In a text-based Flash animation entitled ARTIST’S STATEMENT NO: 45,730,944: THE PERFECT ARTISTIC WEBSITE (1999-2003) by Seoul-based collaborative YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES (YHCHI), the work’s imagined protagonist reflects on the Internet as a space for innovative forms of art:

THE WEB.
THE BIGGEST ART SPACE:
THE WEB.
THE GREATEST CHANCE
TO SAY SOMETHING
OR TO MAKE SOMETHING
DUMB.
OR, BETTER YET,
BORING.

The quote seems an apt place to begin a discussion of artists who have pioneered art on the Internet through a conscientiously lo-fi approach to parodying structures of power and technology. Excerpted from an online animation featuring black text flashing like cue cards across a white background, the passage raises the utopian promise of the web as a space for radical new kinds of art and then distills it into something more complicated and perhaps more true.

By pointing to the fact that the web offers “THE GREATEST CHANCE TO SAY SOMETHING OR TO MAKE SOMETHING DUMB,” the artists, by way of their protagonist, reduce the grandiose notion of cyberspace into a mere extension of a media-saturated culture constantly pandering to the lowest common denominator. The statement questions the truism that “the medium is the message” or that a new creative forum will naturally improve culture. It confronts an economy in which creativity becomes quickly commodified—a context the artists celebrate and resist at the same time.

Critics often draw parallels between conceptual artists and Internet artists. The two genres of contemporary art share a fascination with systems of meaning, instructions and the production of art that escapes materiality. The work of YHCHI resonates with the conceptual art of Lawrence Weiner, one of the earliest proponents of the genre, whose work, coincidentally, was mounted in New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art concurrent with a new installation by YHCHI to inaugurate the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s new downtown location. Weiner is a self-proclaimed sculptor of words who issues evocative, open-ended statements, often descriptions of artworks and actions, such as A RUBBER BALL THROWN AT THE SEA (1969). These actions can then be realized in the exhibition space or simply be presented as wall texts that ask viewers to complete the work in their imaginations. YHCHI’s text-based works function similarly as descriptions. Yet, where Weiner’s texts can be transposed across different media, YHCHI self-consciously use the web as a stage for the rehearsal of psychological conflict, paranoia, fear and desperation.

YHCHI emerged alongside an international avant-garde in the 1990s who were among the first to experiment with the Internet as a platform for art. Since that time, they have created consistently styled animations made with Flash, the ubiquitous software that revolutionized Internet graphics and design interactivity. Each one features text written in all capital letters in a Monaco font and skillfully synchronized to remixes of jazz, mambo or bossa nova. Through this spare combination of text and music, they craft vibrant, multi-layered narratives. While today, art engaged with the Internet takes physical form in installations, videos, prints, objects and digital pieces, YHCHI’s early works were created specifically for exhibition on the web and explored the new medium’s formal and conceptual possibilities.

YHCHI were particularly interested in the anonymity the web offered. Thanks to the remote nature of online communication, they could present their work without having to reveal anything about themselves or their backgrounds. This mystique became an intrinsic part of their artistic persona. Correspondingly, a precise timeline of their collective formation is not available nor is much biographical information. What is known about the founders is that each worked individually before meeting: Young-Hae Chang, born in South Korea, as a visual artist and Marc Voge, an American, as a poet. Yet most other personal information has been diligently suppressed by the mandates of the mock corporate structure Chang and Voge use as their creative foil. Young-Hae Chang serves as Chief Executive Officer and Marc Voge as Chief Information Officer of YHCHI, turning the figure of the lone, relatively powerless individual artist on its head. In doing so, YHCHI create the perfect disguise for interrogating systems of power through deft characterizations of political figures, the social elite and others confusedly bound up in those systems, including the artists themselves.

Since incorporating, YHCHI has broadcast approximately 50 works in a style so formalized it would appear to be part of a larger marketing strategy. Their ever-broadening international recognition has been spurred by commissions to make online works for the websites of the Tate London and Paris’ Centre Pompidou and their inclusion in exhibitions at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and multiple biennials. While stylistically similar, each of their narrative animations offers an entirely new cast of characters, constructed solely out of text descriptions, with the size, shape and pacing of their words carefully edited to musical cues that lend nuance to their fictive personalities. 

Before YouTube’s endless supply of first-person performances became a touchstone of popular culture, YHCHI crafted short, web-based portrayals of characters living out popular fictions and fantasies. In DAKOTA (2000), for example, two young lovers chart a familiar path across the desert, ricocheting between the highway, motels and road-stop diners, all the while ruminating about “DYING YOUNG.” Their story is told through black text on a white background set off against noisy, loose percussion and heaving rhythms layered over a constant beat that sounds like a rolling train. In one passage they describe themselves as: “READY TO HIT THE ROAD . . WE ROLLED BACK THE TOP, DOWN THE WINDOWS. . . PUT BEER CASES IN HER TRUNK, OUR BUTTS ON HER UPHOLSTERY. . . WHOOPIN’ ‘N HOLLERIN’, THE SUN HIGH ABOVE.” The American narrative of cross-country abandon, crystallized by Jack Kerouac or Bonnie and Clyde, is satirized here through the dialogue of two characters whose rebellion is overtly self-conscious and stylized.

Another piece infused with cliché, THE END (2000), is a compilation of romantic goodbyes that vacillate between the bittersweet and the accusatory, such as “ME? I WAS THE “NAGGING” BITCH.”? The music begins with the sounds of an upright bass, plucked with increasing intensity, and is then joined by clashing drums, as the good-byes appear and disappear with greater speed. In referencing cinematic conventions, YHCHI evoke genres such as Westerns, film noir, action and experimental film through the score and pacing of their text, which is crafted carefully to signal different shades of emotion as the words speed up, enlarge and contract. In so doing, YHCHI demonstrate how casual remarks such as “CAN’T WE JUST BE FRIENDS?” are shot through with ritualized expression. By assuming the first-person position, YHCHI elevate these works above parody, demonstrating how they themselves are also produced and caught by the Hollywood-driven media culture around them.  

Western ideals of the superficial kind—for instance, youth and beauty—often find themselves in YHCHI’s crosshairs, appearing as misguided life-goals that leave their protagonists spiritually dry and desperate for meaning. Other works extend this particular brand of existential crisis beyond Hollywood-derived characterizations. Evocative, dream-like sequences comprise TRAVELING TO UTOPIA (2006), which thoughtfully interrogates our deepening relationship to technology, and THE ART OF SLEEP (2006), which explores the machinations of the contemporary art market.

CUNNILINGUS IN NORTH KOREA (2003) subverts the objective tone of a news broadcast or political pronouncement. A work that involves a significant amount of political risk for artists living in Seoul, CUNNILINGUS begins with a note that reads: “THE FOLLOWING IS A TEXT THAT NORTH KOREA’S DEAR LEADER KIM JONG-IL ASKED YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES TO PRESENT.” and continues to explain, through a meticulous argument, that North Koreans have found that communist-style gender equality is the key to superlative acts of sex, which YHCHI sum up in the short-hand formula: “DIALECTICAL SEX AND GENDER = HAPPY PEOPLE.” The artists explained over email that the piece emerged as a response to the anti-American, pro-North Korea sentiment fashionable in South Korea at the time. CUNNILINGUS equates the mass appreciation of American sexual freedom with what YHCHI cast as a new craze: the communist rhetoric espoused by political leaders in North Korea. A flagrant defiance of social codes, the work mashes together words and phrases like “CUNNILINGUS,” “MULTIPLE FEMALE ORGASM” and “KIM JONG-IL” into the same visual space with uncharacteristic hints of color. Notably, the artists produced a Korean-language version of the piece but have never published or exhibited it.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, YHCHI’s low-bandwidth Internet animations were formally strategic. Easy to render and play, they could be accessed from dial-up connections around the world, garnering the pair an international audience. Now, amid the image-, video- and bandwidth-rich landscape of the web, these works serve as counterpoints—antidotes to the visual excess of today’s web.

In recent years, YHCHI have begun to elaborate their works into installations. Commissioned by New York’s New Museum and co-presented by Rhizome, BLACK ON WHITE, GRAY ASCENDING (2007) was the first time YHCHI expanded their work from one to seven screens. Nearly 12 minutes in length, BLACK ON WHITE recounts a kidnapping, conspiracy and possible assassination from multiple points of view on seven screens playing seven different narratives on loop. It is a violent story assembled through fragmented testimony from the politicos behind the plot, the thugs who executed it and the loved one from whose arms the target was wrenched, among others.

Containing a range of expressive voices clamoring for attention, the piece is cacophonous and impossible to read as a whole. It frustrates viewers, first leading them towards climax or coherence and then dashing their hopes by progressing to the next exclamation. BLACK ON WHITE prevents the viewer from distilling a timeline or facts from the many divergent eye-witness accounts, which alternate in tone from terrified to cold-blooded. Laura Hoptman, senior curator at the New Museum, describes in an essay on the artists how BLACK ON WHITE resonates with our recent media history—gruesome kidnappings, torture and a climate of terrorism—and our own complicated consumption of this news:

…it has become increasingly clear that there is no reliable authoritative voice available to us, not in the media, not in politics, not in ethics—who can truly describe the awful events of this current world conflict. For those who care to do it, truth then, must be re-constructed, Rashomon-like, from many witnesses with many different perspectives... BLACK AND WHITE, GRAY ASCENDING… argue[s] that this should not mean that we give up on being witnesses, or on trying to find out what is happening.

This urgency, hopelessness and anger in the face of power infuses YHCHI’s entire body of work. The statements they make are, at once, punctures in the side of prevailing politics or fashions, while also modest and riddled with doubt and confusion. This is uncomfortably evident in a reflection upon the practice of making art, excerpted from the 1999 work, ARTISTIC PERSONA: “COULD I BE DOING SOMETHING ELSE BESIDES THIS? LIKE SAVING MY SOUL? OR SAVING SOMEONE ELSE’S? OR GIVING SOMEONE HELL? OR READING A BOOK? OR WATCHING TV?” YHCHI address a new breed of dissonance that has emerged online; one that doesn’t require an established soap box to stand on and packages a spirit of existentialism with a ferocious punch and a smile.