After New Order… and The Duck Among Us

PROJECT HASHTAG is an open call project of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) supporting experimental platforms for curating and exhibiting art, challenging traditional visuality, and proposing collaborations among young creators from diverse disciplines. The hashtag symbol is an innovative way to connect unrelated writings or posts on social media platforms. Simply adding subjects using hashtags gives us an infinite number of ways to find and create context from random writings. PROJECT HASHTAG is a five-year project sponsored by Hyundai Motor Company that presented its first showcase of works by GANGNAMBUG and Seoul Queer Collective in 2019. This year we invite you to the showcase for PROJECT HASHTAG 2021: After New Order… and The Duck Among Us.

PROJECT HASHTAG 2021 reflects concerns of Gen Z and millennial artists regarding online experiences and environments that are heavily influencing and rapidly reshaping our humanity. The pandemic has moved our lives online and now we laugh, cry, enjoy, and get angry more expressively than ever in the online space. But who is protecting, creating, and being able to access this online space that became so important to us? Are we players or mere bystanders of what is happening online? Isn’t this anonymous and boundless space called “the web” distorting or disturbing human values? Are our feelings expressed on the web the same as what we feel in the real world? To answer these questions, participating artists observe how traditional human values are expanded or distorted in the virtual space under a new order and new values and make experimental attempts based on their observations.

After New Order…
Artists: Yoon Choong-geun, Ki Yelim, Nam Seon-mi, Lee So-hyeon, Lee Jisu
After New Order… asks if utopian qualities we had expected from the early internet such as freedom, openness, and ethical values have been realized in the current online world and reviews directions we should take to promote them. To ensure web accessibility, independence from dominating platforms, and eco-friendliness, artists constructed virtual worlds such as #KoreaWebsitePrize, #AltMMCA, and #MicroDataCenter, from both technical and ethical perspectives. You can also meet visual and physical installations in the exhibition hall and get a sense of the “beyond-human scale” of web space data.

The Duck Among Us
Artists: Shin Hee-jung, Lee Ga-Young, Jeong Man-Keun, Son Jung-Ah
The Duck Among Us focuses on subculture actively engaging with online platforms and looks into human desires that are expressed openly within anonymous subculture contexts. Artists present pixel ducks as a symbol of the cycle of desire, consumption, and death as they are easily consumed and discarded. Featuring the duck, #WhosTheDuckAmongUs? depicts provocative and instant content like Mukbang (eating broadcasts), while a web novel #IFeelLikeEatingYouToday implies one’s appetite overlapping with sex drive. This web novel employs Snack Culture (a newly coined term in Korea referring to quick media consumption) as a means to explore speciesism, habitus, and minority politics in a casual way together with the exhibition. You can read it on KakaoPage during the exhibition period.

The web enabled the art works in the exhibit to stay open-ended, eschewing to produce final terms. The official website projecthashtag.net connects the on-going online projects using hypertext: #Koreanwebsiteprize; #AltMMCA; #WhatsHappeningDictionary; #WhatsHappeningSelection; #IFeelLikeEatingYouToday; #EgoEco-EcoEcho. Moreover, the website generates transmuting contexts by sorting out the artworks by hashtags provided by the artists. Ushered by the hashtags, users can find further details, on-going process, and stories about the artworks which increases the doors to comprehend the works exponentially.

The two teams’ efforts to address the expansion and distortion of human values are in line with Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, a groundbreaking essay published in 1985, that expanded the concept of the human body emphasizing its hybridity driven by technology. As Hito Steyerl who evaluated the applications pointed out, such imagination and alternatives from experimenting efforts are only possible in the public realm free from the capital and political power, and we hope this exhibition initiates future-oriented agenda for the new generation through their works.

—Sooyon Lee (MMCA Curator)