September 13–November 5, 2011
Artist Talk: September 16, 6pm
Opening: September 16
Audain Gallery: 7–9pm
Centre A: 8pm
149 West Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6B 1H4
Tuesday–Saturday 12–6pm
www.audaingallery.ca
The Audain Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming fall exhibition and Audain Artist-in-Residence, the Seoul, Korea-based duo Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI). Commissioned by the Audain Gallery, THERE ARE NO PROBLEMS IN ART, will be presented from September 13–November 5, 2011 in collaboration with Centre A, Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Since the late 1990s, YHCHI have been producing work that draws on and refigures the potentials and limitations of net art, digital literature, conceptual writing, as well as television and cinema. In their web-based works and in their gallery projections, YHCHI utilize Flash to animate rapid narrative events, linguistic landscapes, and critical reflections on the role of art and the artist. Accompanied by jazz-based soundtracks (often made by the artists) that often refer to the legendary bebop drummers Kenny Clark and Max Roach, YHCHI are visual-linguistic events, mediated by software, that unfold rapidly in conjunction or in counter-point to the soundtrack, pushing the relationship of viewing and reading. As Mark Tribe, author of New Media Art, describes: “By accelerating the pace at which the text appears to a rate just within the threshold of human cognition, the artists coax us into a state of rapt concentration.” [1]
Although they are often located in the framework of net art, unlike many earlier net artists, their work resists the idea of interactivity. Instead, their work builds up a narrative strategy or an artistic address that is, as poet and electronic literature critic, Brian Kim Stefans characterizes it, “primarily characterized by the computer’s power to create a state of desire in the user and then to deny the user satisfaction of that desire suddenly and absolutely.” [2]
Through their use of sound, image, new media, and installation, the framework of net art, and its specific history, is not broad enough to define YHCHI’s practice. Instead, it could be argued that visual art is the only field open enough to incorporate poetry, cinema, new media, and music. In their recent work, this openness of visual art and its cultural value of art is both engagingly used and criticized, as the work for the Audain Gallery, THERE ARE NO PROBLEMS IN ART, demonstrates.
As the Audain Visual Artists in Residence, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ practice is ideally suited to the SFU Visual Arts program with its emphasis on artistic interdisciplinarity and to Vancouver’s rich history of the relationship between poetry and visual art.
[1] wiki.brown.edu
[2] blog.sfmoma.org
About the Audain Gallery
The Audain Gallery serves as a vital aspect of the Visual Arts program at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts. Its mission is to advance the aesthetic and discursive production and presentation of contemporary visual art through a responsive program of exhibitions in support of engaged pedagogy. The Audain Gallery encourages conceptual and experimental projects that explore the dialogue between the social and the cultural in contemporary artistic practices. The Audain Visual Artists in Residence Program and student exhibitions are central to the gallery’s programming.
The Audain Gallery is curated by Sabine Bitter.
