[spectre] Visual Foreign Correspondents presents Issue 10 Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries

[Marieke Istha]

Visual Foreign Correspondents presents
Issue 10
Date: 7 October2008/ 3 November 2008
Artists: Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries
Country: South Korea
Title: Morning of the Mongoloids, 2008

In collaboration with The Globalised Crystal Ball we are proud to 
announce the tenth issue of Visual Foreign Correspondents. VFC is an 
independent platform in which 11 distinguished artists from around the 
world are invited each month to give their personal visual commentary on 
events and situations from their locally situated perspective. Their 
works especially created for urban screens and online platforms. This 
project will give people in the streets of Amsterdam a brief window into 
other regions, peoples and other kinds of imagination.

Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries is a duo composed of the Korean 
Young-hae Chang and the American Marc Voge living and working in Seoul. 
They combine text with jazz music in their flashy Flash productions. 
Herein they use solely the Monaco font and are breaking with this the 
Internet rules of interactivity, photo's, illustrations and excessive 
use of colours. They bombard language as the essence of the Internet.
Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries has found a way to generate attention 
for the story and forces the reader almost to reading the texts. The 
constant flow of words has got a physical hypnotising effect. The mostly 
black or white lettering comes at different speeds, sometimes slowly and 
easy to follow and then incredibly fast, almost impossible to keep 
track. The size of the lettering, the way it has been organized on the 
screen, and the speed at which the text comes by, change all the time 
and is connected to the story (telling) and the music. The stories vary 
from daily occurrences to politically hinting texts on sex.
The work of Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries is clearly related to 
cinema and poetry. The reference to film is visible in the fact that all 
their text pieces consequently start with the line: 'Young-hae Chang 
Heavy Industries presents', and after that the counting down from ten to 
one comes in as in the early cinema. But next to film and (Internet) 
poetry their work exists on the border of digital animation, 
experimental video and film graphics.

For VFC Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries came up with 'MORNING OF THE 
MONGOLOIDS', that is about a man getting up one morning as a changed 
person. It is the hilarious, tragic and ironical story of a white man 
who wakes up with a hangover after a night of partying in somebody else 
his skin. Slowly he finds out, without any logical reason for this, that 
he looks Korean, speaks Korean and lives in Seoul. With this work the 
artists do not display their own vision on the local environment, but 
are eventually holding a mirror on us. Through the (Korean) view of 
Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries the westerners are being confronted 
with their biased views on Asian people. According to the duo the 
transformation of the man has something to do with our fears of the Other.

In 1999 the Korean artist Young-hae Chang, who has a Ph.D. in aesthetics 
from the University of Paris, and the American poet Marc Voge based in 
Seoul, met each other in a Net Art workshop in Australia. They focused 
on Flash during this workshop and by the second day they had learned how 
to make text appear on the screen and how to set this to music. At this 
moment they had found their medium and produce under the name Young-hae 
Chang Heavy Industries the characteristic fast, musical text pieces 
since that moment. They live and work in Seoul, South-Korea.

The work will be launched during the seminar event of the Globalised 
Crystal Ball in the conference space. An introduction to the work will 
be given, making a connection to the seminar and the ideas of the artist.

Independent from the seminar the work will then feature on the urban 
screen outside the ‘Balie’ every night for a month, on the The 
Contemporary Art Screen at the Zuidas Amsterdam and the Urban Screen 
Festival in Melbourne.

These screens will be in relationship to a specially designed website 
and ‘Oog’. The VFC website will show the work and contextualize it with 
political, social and cultural background information. Furthermore it 
will give information about the project and a possibility for the 
audience to interact.

The work will also feature in ‘OOG’, a commentary and opinion platform 
that is part the online edition of De Volkskrant, a major Dutch daily 
national newspaper. Here the work will feature for a week as part of the 
continuing series of artist commentaries.

www.visualcorrespondents.com

Screen locations
De Balie: Kleine-Gartmanplantsoen 10, Amsterdam: www.debalie.nl
CASZ: Zuidplein, Amsterdam www.caszuidas.nl
Urban Screen Festival Melbourne: www.urbanscreens08.net
OOG: www.volkskrant.nl/oog

Visual Foreign Correspondents
Artistic director: Nanette Hoogslag
Editors: Annet Dekker, Petra Heck, David Garcia, Nat Muller and Eric 
Kluitenberg

For more information please contact Nanette Hoogslag at 
info at visualcorrespondents.com

Visual Foreign Correspondents is made possible by Amsterdamse Fonds voor 
de Kunsten, VSB, Prins Bernhardultuurfonds, De Balie en het Nederlands 
Instituut voor Mediakunst