Click over to the LACMA site to view six new text-based projects by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, who are part of "Your Bright Future," an exhibition featuring work by South Korean artists that opened this Sunday (June 28) at LACMA. Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries is the name of the creative pair Young-Hae Chang and Marc Voge, who, over the last decade or so, have crafted a series of text-and-music shorts using Flash. "It's a simple technique that shuns interactivity, graphics, photos, illustrations, banners, colors, and all but the Monaco font, and at the same time cuts across the lines separating digital animation, motion graphics, experimental video, i-movies, and e-poetry," the pair explained a few years ago in an interview with Thom Swiss. "To us, though, it's Web art." Among their many projects, my favorites include The Last Day of Betty Nkomo, as well as Dakota, which is based on a reading of Ezra Pound's Cantos I and II. These videos demonstrate the power of text on screen - try looking away! - and are often brilliant examples of visual storytelling, despite their reduced graphic palette. Size suggests emphasis, and often pacing determines meaning. Color reversal sometimes suggests a second speaker, and voice is generally implied, although in the pieces for LACMA, the artists opted for a voice synthesizer as narrator. The new pieces for the LACMA show are humorous anecdotes about art, artists and the art world. What's nice about the series is that phrases circulate among the different videos, echoing with different meanings and uniting the videos, which in the end, despite their different stories, are a lot about the emptiness of art, a conundrum countenanced by the mechanized voices but ultimately refuted by the works themselves. The show as a whole, up through September 20, includes two more videos by the pair, as well as work by 11 other artists. The image is from Betty Nkomo...
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What interesting sounding exhibits! And how fascinating that South Korean artists are so carefully intertwined with the nation's dominant cyberculture. Why do you think these artists have indeed placed so much emphasis on text and the web?
I went to the LACMA yesterday to check out "Your Bright Future." Not only was Young-Hae Chang and Marc Voge's work captivating, I found all the other works to be just as thought provoking. They enganged the individual.
There was a display of animals stacked on top of each other and on the wall behind it the artist wrote that there were immigrant workers inside of the animals, who were working for only $5 an hour. A teenage girl asked her dad if there were really people inside. He said no. But just to make sure, the whole family went over to the security guard to ask. The way people interact with the work, thats art.