PACIFIC LIMN
2013 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES
Pacific Limn weaves together three narratives that comment on hyper-capitalism pan-Pacific cities that San Francisco exemplifies. Each of the large works comprise of moving images overlaid with giant text, all synched to a stealthy, up-tempo jazz soundtrack. In The Secret Life of Harumi, a Japanese woman fantasizes escaping her job and living a temporary dream life in San Francisco. Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI) uses locally sourced virtual products such as Adobe Flash animation and Apple’s Monaco or Menlo typeface to create a whimsical and indirect commentary on the psychology of the working class in an information society within postindustrial imperialism. For two months, YHCHI inhabited the economically polarized South of Market neighborhood, where a variety of socioeconomic realities overlap and coexist, from Facebook employees to the homeless. The Flash animation is influenced by realist cinema and depicts the tediousness in commuting by air and ground combined with the kitsch of an “Asia-town” window display. Overlaid with text-like femslash prose in a semi-coherent style of karaoke lyrics, the sensory cacophony disrupts a viewer’s thoughts and alludes to a desensitized boredom mixed with the desires of the alternative persona of a fictional Japanese woman.
YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, a partnership between the South Korean artist Young Hae Chang and the American poet Mark Voge, is widely known as a pioneering net art project. However, this label in many ways limits the breadth of their work, which simply took the early internet as a productive medium for a more expansive practice. Their signature, flash-animation form hasn’t varied much since their formation: in a practice parallel to concrete poetry, text-driven narratives are flashed sentence by sentence over a colored backdrop, oftentimes set to jazz compositions. Drawing comparisons to propaganda and advertising strategies, YHCHI draws into an ethical limn between representation and oppression, truth and fiction in the digital era, by way of their inhabitation of perspectives beyond their own positionalities. Rather than propose the internet as a potential realm for the imagination of new narrative futures, pasts, and stories, YHCHI actualizes these practices, the viewer rendered helpless under their visual onslaught: their work is oftentimes difficult to watch, and in its original flash-animation form was not pausable. Harnessing a jazz aesthetic, traditionally a black music of improvisation, YHCHI proposes an unapologetic appropriation in order to realize aesthetic and critical rewards. Increasingly, the world YHCHI constructs has become tenable, any “objective” position compromised as digital ecologies become emergently infected by interests and power, whether for better or worse.
Colors:
Related works sharing similar palette
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Weekly Picks: Malaysia (22–28 October 2018) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Weekly To Do October 22, 2018 The 11th International Kuala Lumpur Eco Film Festival 2018 , at Publika, 22–28 Oct This annual environmental film festival has been here since 2008, and grown over the years in breadth...
© » KADIST
siren eun young jung
2018Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk ...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Expand, Exchange, and Beyond: A reflection of the Asian Arts Media Roundtable 2021 at SIFA | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints June 9, 2021 By Gladhys Elliona It was a laid-back day at the end of April, when I got the email from ArtsEquator informing me that I had gotten into the Asian Arts Media Roundtable (AAMR) at the Singapore International Festival of Arts 2021...
© » RANDIAN ZH
(English) The Bunker art space announced Thursday that its landlord, Renmin University Of China, has decided to convert the entire courtyard into a ‘patriotic education base’ and was resuming all premises in the adjacent courtyard, particularly those with historical significance, such as the former bunker....
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Burning Questions: Is There Still Hope for Integrity and Intimacy in Online Performance? | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints August 4, 2020 Artists today have to grapple with being true to their creative integrities while dealing with the limitations of tech platforms and live delivery methods...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Burning Questions: Traditional Arts: The Forgotten COVID Casualty? | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints July 28, 2020 While the pandemic has resulted in losses of jobs in the arts, less has been said about the fate of craftsmen, artisans and masters of intangible heritage and traditional arts...
© » LITHUB
How Ai Weiwei Marries Advocacy and Art at Home and Abroad ‹ Literary Hub Craft and Criticism Fiction and Poetry News and Culture Lit Hub Radio Reading Lists Book Marks CrimeReads About Log In Literary Hub Craft and Criticism Literary Criticism Craft and Advice In Conversation On Translation Fiction and Poetry Short Story From the Novel Poem News and Culture History Science Politics Biography Memoir Food Technology Bookstores and Libraries Film and TV Travel Music Art and Photography The Hub Style Design Sports Freeman’s The Virtual Book Channel Lit Hub Radio Behind the Mic Beyond the Page The Cosmic Library The Critic and Her Publics Emergence Magazine Fiction/Non/Fiction First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing Future Fables The History of Literature I’m a Writer But Just the Right Book Keen On The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan New Books Network Read Smart Talk Easy Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast Write-minded Reading Lists The Best of the Decade Book Marks Best Reviewed Books BookMarks Daily Giveaway CrimeReads True Crime The Daily Thrill CrimeReads Daily Giveaway Log In How Ai Weiwei Marries Advocacy and Art at Home and Abroad From His Graphic Memoir, "Zodiac" Via Ten Speed Press By Ai Weiwei, Elettra Stamboulis and Gianluca Costantini January 30, 2024 The following is from Zodiac: A Graphic Memoir by Ai Weiwei with Elettra Stamboulis, illustrated by Gianluca Constantini...
© » KADIST
Claudia Joskowicz
2015Some Dead Don’t Make a Sound (Hay muertos que no hacen ruido) is a single-channel video by Claudia Joskowicz that features the Mexican legend of the Weeping Woman (La Llorona) as its main protagonist...
© » KADIST
Köken Ergun and Satyam Mishra
2022Nepal and China signed an agreement for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2017...
© » KADIST
Loris Gréaud
2004The acronym “CFL” stands for an existing light standard (Compact Fluorescent Light) as well as a standard nutrient (Cognitive Fooding Laboratory)...