Honeymoon in Beppu is a site-specific work by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, a partnership between the South Korean artist Young Hae Chang and the American poet Mark Voge widely recognised for pioneering net art projects.
However, this label, in many ways, limits the scope of their work, which viewed the early internet as a productive medium for a more expansive practice. Their signature flash-animation style resembles concrete poetry, where text-driven narratives are displayed sentence by sentence against a coloured backdrop, often accompanied by jazz compositions. By drawing comparisons to propaganda and advertising strategies, YHCHI navigates the ethical divide between representation and oppression, as well as truth and fiction in the digital era. Instead of merely proposing the internet as a potential space for imagining new narratives, pasts, and stories, YHCHI brings these concepts to life. This renders the viewer somewhat helpless under the barrage of visuals, as their work can be challenging to watch and, in its original flash-animation form, was not pauseable.
YHCHI embraces a jazz aesthetic which reflects the traditional improvisational music of Black culture to boldly appropriate ideas for aesthetic and critical gain. The world YHCHI creates has become increasingly viable; any claim to an “objective” standpoint is undermined as digital landscapes become influenced by various interests and power dynamics, for better or worse. Their work, available in 20 languages, features text-based animations made in Adobe Flash that are carefully synchronised with an often original musical score, typically rooted in jazz.
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In 2001, the group was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists. Their solo show,“Black on White, Gray Ascending”, a seven-channel installation, was part of the inaugural opening of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, in 2007. They are 2012 Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Creative Arts Fellows. In 2018-19 their work was part of the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT9) at the QAGOMA in Brisbane, Australia. YHCHI gave the 2020 Renato Poggioli Lecture at Harvard University. M+ commissioned a majorwork, CRUCIFIED TVS — NOT A PRAYER IN HEAVEN, for its inaugural museum opening, in 2021. In 2022 a show of their work, both on- and offline, opened at Tate Modern, London. To accompany their 2022-23 solo show at Neue Berliner Kunstverein, YHCHI made a 2361-page artist’s book, SOUVENIR. Their work will be included in the new edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature.
Honeymoon in Beppu was commissioned by Beppu Project NPO. It is part of the inaugural Beppu Contemporary Art Festival: Mixed Bathing World Triennale in Oita, Japan. The project was produced by Jun’ya Yamaide and directed by Serizawa Takashi and Keith Whittle, who served as the advisor and assistant director.
