YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES
The Bullet is Still in My Left Wrist
The Bullet is Still in My Left Wrist is a video work by YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES. To the syncopations of a jazzy soundtrack, Korean words in white against a black background flashes between an English dialogue in black text against white ground. Comprised of curt lines such as “forever” “failure” “to live,” the Korean forms non-sequiturs and double entendres to the English script following a line of questioning between a detective and a victim telling a meandering story surrounding a bullet being in a wrist, going to hospital, traveling to Japan, and the discovery of a love triangle. This narrative of a potentially grave situation is told in a nonchalant manner. Edited with precision, the flashing animation reads at the speed of normal speech, yet, with only a few words per frame, the story insinuates and digresses as different combinations of meaning arise in the viewer’s memory of the story. The rhythm is akin to that of New Wave cinema and the flashing black and white of the screen of text strips bare a filmic apparatus that allows the viewer to consider the mechanics of story-telling.
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.