Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (Young-Hae Chang, Marc Voge)

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES PRESENTS: DOWN IN FUKUOKA WITH THE BELARUSIAN BLUES is a text-based work that was originally shown on a tilted LCD screen in the shop window of Gallery Hyundai in Seoul in 2010. It formed part of the exhibition of the same name by the artistic collective Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. Both in its positioning on the street, and in the content of its message, the work announced the exhibition to visitors and passers-by.

The title of this work (and of the exhibition) is an English translation of a sworn deposition made by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) in 1873, transposed into a twenty-first-century context. In his testimony, Rimbaud recounted his dramatic confrontation with another French poet, Paul Verlaine (1844–1896), which took place in a Brussels hotel. The narrative of the Seoul exhibition unfolded in several animated texts, shown either as projections or displayed on LCD screens, addressing overarching themes concerning human emotions and emotional histories central to artistic creativity. The texts used in the works are in English and Korean, narrating the same content in the two alternating languages. Two other works from the same exhibition, Teaser 2010 (Tate T13638) and Trailer 2010 (Tate T13639), are also in Tate’s collection.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries is an artistic collective that formed in Paris in 1996, consisting of the Korean artist Young-Hae Chang and the American artist Marc Voge. Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries came to prominence among the first artists who contributed to the establishment of the internet as a valid artistic medium. Employing ‘flash’ (a computer programme often used to create animation) as their primary medium, they made and distributed online text-based works with original music soundtracks. The artists have employed this straightforward method of production for all their work, and use the same plain typography in standard Monaco font, typically in black. The script changes and moves in synch with the rhythm of the music soundtracks they compose, usually in an electro and jazz style. Each work is looped, and can be displayed either as a projection or on a screen. Tate’s copies are the first in the editions of six plus one artist’s proof.

The works of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries are influenced by the writing of French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) and, in particular, by his interplay between style and content and between the sounds words make as much as the meaning they convey. Sitting somewhere between concrete poetry and narrative literature, between visual images and abstract stories, their text-based pieces challenge accepted conventions of literary and visual disciplines.

Further reading
YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES website, www.yhchang.com
‘The Art of Sleep’, Intermedia Art: New Media, Sound and Performance, Tate http://www2.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/the_art_of_sleep.shtm

Sook-Kyung Lee
March 2011