Seeing Things That Others Don't See

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...