[NetBehaviour] LX 2.0 new comission: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries - TODAY

[Luis Silva]

Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporanea launches today, May 24th, LX 2.0  
Project's new comission: Manhã dos Mongolóides (Morning of the  
Mongoloids) by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries.

For LX 2.0 (http://www.lisboa20.pt/lx20), Young-Hae Chang Heavy  
Industries created the Portuguese version of Morning of the  
Mongoloids, the laughable, yet tragic (and extremely ironic) story of  
a white men that wakes up after a night of “drunken partying” to  
find himself no longer who he used to be. Without any motive or  
underlying logic, the man wakes up and gradually realizes he is  
Korean. He looks Korean, he speaks Korean and he lives in Seoul, when  
just the night before he was a white man living in a western country.  
The piece is a delightful insight on the prejudiced views towards  
Asian cultures and specially, Korean culture. Not only are we faced  
with the main character’s stereotypes of Asian people, as he  
gradually comes to terms with the improbable change, we, westerners,  
are confronted with our own biased views of the rest of the world. It  
is us, not “china men” who are being ironically portrayed. It is a  
mirror-like device and it is returning us our own prejudiced image of  
ourselves.


Almost ten years ago, in 1999, in a net art workshop in Brisbane,  
Australia, Young-Hae Chang and Marc Voge, a Korean artist and an  
American poet, were learning how to work with Flash. Instead of fully  
mastering the digital tool, they concentrated in two of its basic  
operations, making text show up in the screen and setting an  
animation to music. These two features, which they came to master  
after a couple of days, would define Young-Hae Chang Heavy  
Industries' artistic practice in the years to come.

Reacting against interactivity as a distinctive feature of new media  
art, and internet art in particular (the duo has openly stated their  
dislike for interactivity, comparing interactive art to a Skinner  
box, but without the reward given after the completion of the desired  
task), this Seoul-based duo has created fast paced Flash movies  
combining text and jazz music, drawing inspiration from concrete  
poetry and experimental film, and through which they have narrated  
stories in languages such as Korean, English, Spanish, German,  
Japanese or Portuguese.

Their net art projects (if you are willing to compromise enough to  
call them that) are stripped of everything usually associated with  
the field: first of all, no interactivity whatsoever, no hidden  
buttons, no hipertextual aesthetics, the narrative is as linear and  
closed as a traditional novel; no graphics, no colours (black rules  
with a few exceptions of blue and red), no photos, no gadgets at all.  
It is a textual aesthetic that imposes itself through a web browser  
window and in which viewers are immersed in strong stories that  
everyone understands and can relate to.

Luis Silva


"It's essential to break rules and do things "wrong" in art. But it's  
seemingly necessary to follow rules and do things "right" in making  
Web art. This is the big problem confronting the Web artist, for the  
technique --and not the art -- of making Web art necessitates obeying  
strict rules the flouting of which is punished by absolute failure to  
create image and sound. One HTML misstep, and nothing works, nothing  
happens on the screen. With this in mind our Web art project tries to  
break as many rules as possible. In our work there is: no  
interactivity; no graphics or graphic design; no photos; no banners;  
no millions-of-colors; no playful fonts; no pyrotechnics. We have a  
special dislike for interactivity. To us it's a paltry, laughable  
thing, like getting a kick out of pulling the trigger of a gun:  
click: bang. We don't get it. When we click on interactive art, we  
get the feeling we're the rat in the Skinner box, except there's only  
the miserable reward, not the shock. Art isn't reward, it's shock, or  
something approaching it, something we would call beauty.
Our Web art tries to express the essence of the Internet:  
information. Strip away the interactiviy, the graphics, the design,  
the photos, the banners, the colors, the fonts and the rest, and  
what's left?

The text"

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries





LX 2.0
(http://www.lisboa20.pt/lx20)










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