Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’s Corporate Cosplay

Recently, YouTube started dumping lyric videos from Renaissance (2022), Beyoncé’s new album, into my feed. Renaissance dips its toe, and sometimes down-right swims, in dance music references. There is one major difference though: while dance music is a genre often made by anon lone wolves hidden in shadowy studios around the globe, Renaissance was seemingly created by a small corporation. ‘Alien Superstar’, to name just one example, has six lyricists, eight producers and 24 writers!

I thought of Beyoncé while watching Ah (2008/2017), a video work by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, which will feature their upcoming exhibition at n.b.k. in Berlin. The collective, which was established in 1999 in South Korea, emerged in what was then the new field of net art in the late ’90s. Described by Rhizome.org as ‘art that acts on the network, or is acted on by it,’ net art projects might feel familiar now, but 20+ years ago, the artists who chose to start working in this field were confronted with no precedent, no schooling and no guidelines.

As with almost all of their works, Ah exists in a narrowly defined aesthetic universe of all caps text typeset in Monaco against a white background. Accompanied by homemade instrumentals, the video tells the story of being detained at a border as told by the detainee’s panicked and racing thoughts. Timed with the music to the millisecond, phrases such as ‘WINDOWLESS BACKROOM’, ‘THEY WATCH YOU TAKE HIM AWAY’ and, in an especially stressful moment, simply just ‘AH’, fill the screen. It might look old fashioned, but two decades ago this method of working with just text and sound was beyond technically brilliant: nothing travelled easier and faster than text over hypertext transfer protocol (aka http), thus their videos rendered at full screen even on slower internet connections. Other videos on the web at the time were typically the size of a thumbnail and had to be downloaded first before you could watch them. YouTube was still years away.

In 2022, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’s videos read more like lyric videos made backwards. Unlike traditional lyric videos, which are essentially window dressing over a completed music track, these videos are the completed track. Watching Ah is a chance to see the staying power of techniques developed in early net art (why fix something not broken?) in today’s media ecosystem. Long before a corporation like Beyoncé cosplayed as a persona, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries – artists who have remained in the shadows by forbidding photography of their IRL selves – cosplayed as a corporation.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’s ‘Please Mistake Me For Somebody’ is on view at n.b.k, Berlin, from 17 December 2022 to 3 February 2023.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 231 with the headline ‘Corporate Cosplay’.

_{Main image: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Ah, 2008/2017, film still. Courtesy: the artists}