Honeymoon in Beppu is a site-specific digital work by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI), the collaborative duo consisting of South Korean artist Young-Hae Chang and American poet Marc Voge. Widely recognised for their pioneering role in net art, YHCHI create distinctive, text-driven animations that challenge the boundaries between literature, visual art, and new media.
While often described as “internet art,” this label only partially captures the breadth of YHCHI’s critically engaged, media-savvy practice. Since the late 1990s, they have treated the internet not merely as a platform, but as a philosophical and political space—one that both shapes and reflects the cultural values and tensions of our digital age.
Honeymoon in Beppu continues this trajectory. Commissioned for the inaugural Beppu Contemporary Art Festival: Mixed Bathing World Triennale in Oita, Japan, the work was developed as a site-specific intervention, using YHCHI’s trademark format: Flash-based text animations set to jazz compositions. Their minimalist aesthetic—stark, fast-paced text against monochrome or pulsating coloured backgrounds—draws on the traditions of concrete poetry, but it also bears striking resemblance to propaganda, advertising, and subtitled cinema.
This resemblance is no accident. YHCHI intentionally adopt the aesthetics of power—corporate, state, algorithmic—and turn them back on themselves, exploring the tension between representation and manipulation, truth and spectacle, subjectivity and control. The viewer is rendered passive, unable to pause or slow down the stream of text, an experience that echoes the inescapable nature of online information and digital overwhelm.
In Honeymoon in Beppu, these concerns are filtered through a local lens, as the artists explore the cultural, spatial, and symbolic resonances of Beppu—famous for its hot springs, touristic allure, and complex relationship with Western imaginaries of Japan. The title invokes romance and escape, but also invites a deeper meditation on the transactional nature of travel, intimacy, and cultural consumption in the age of global capitalism. This marks a pivotal contribution to YHCHI’s ongoing engagement with global narratives and local conditions through the lens of digitally mediated storytelling.
At the heart of YHCHI’s practice is their embrace of jazz—not only as a musical form but as a mode of thought. Improvisational, bold, and richly layered, their jazz-infused works pay homage to the Black cultural traditions that underpin much of modern art and music. They use this framework to dismantle hegemonic narratives and question ideas of artistic originality, authorship, and the fixed “self.” Their works, which have been produced in over 20 languages, are intended for a global audience. And yet, they retain an intensely local specificity, often reflecting the social, political, and linguistic dynamics of the context in which they are shown.
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries has exhibited extensively across the world. Highlights include: Black on White, Gray Ascending, a seven-channel installation at the inaugural opening of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2007). Participation in the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT9) at QAGOMA, Brisbane (2018–19), The 2020 Renato Poggioli Lecture at Harvard University. The major commissioned work CRUCIFIED TVS — NOT A PRAYER IN HEAVEN for the opening of M+ Museum, Hong Kong (2021). A major solo exhibition at Tate Modern, London (2022), accompanied by a hybrid on- and offline program. The artist’s book SOUVENIR, created for their 2022–23 solo show at Neue Berliner Kunstverein, a 2361-page conceptual publication. Their inclusion in the forthcoming edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, signifying their growing critical recognition within both literary and artistic canons
Honeymoon in Beppu was commissioned by Beppu Project NPO as part of the Beppu Contemporary Art Festival: Mixed Bathing World Triennale. The project was produced by Jun’ya Yamaide and directed by Serizawa Takashi, with Keith Whittle serving as advisor and assistant director.
