Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries
Unit formed by Young-Hae Chang (South Korea) and Marc Voge (USA).
Both live in Seoul, South Korea.

Subject: Hello (2004)
Spanish version “Asunto: Hola” (2006)

As is characteristic in the works of Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, Subject: Hello also imposes a vertiginous reading dynamic. An impacting succession of fragments of text and simple yet powerful typographic effects interrelated very effectively with the musical and sound accompaniment (in this work, a synthetic female voice reads the texts simultaneous to her visual presence), forming a system that stimulates and actively catches the spectator's attention. In this case, the entire storyline is developed around the reading of an e-mail message (based on many of the e-mails that often circulate the Web with the darkest of intentions) sent by someone claiming to be the sister of a former South Korean minister sentenced for corruption and embezzlement, who tries to convince the receiver of the message to help her to get a major fortune out of the country. This proposition is exposed throughout the message with the convincing coldness and precision of someone obliged to ask a stranger for such a delicate collaboration. However, this receiver's choice is finally justified, in two p.s. notes to the message, in a surprisingly esoteric and unexplainably affective way. The narration thus opens up various fronts regarding suspicion and fraud, both in the lucrative plane and in the exclusively personal and affective sphere, thus alluding to the permanent sensations of uncertainty, scepticisms and mistrust that we feel in the sphere of personal and commercial communications and relations by e-mail and, in a wider sense, in the faults that open up around the living and psychological experience of the web and of what we can or wish to receive through it.