Yehwan Song ^(KR)

Yehwan Song (b. 1995) is a web artist based in New York. The artist acutely captures the discomfort and anxiety felt by users marginalized by the glamorous façade of technological utopianism. Song’s work consists primarily of satire and critique of the excessive generalization of users and the uniformity of template-based websites that are prevalent in today’s online environment. Based on this critique, the artist creates idiosyncratic web interfaces that break away from conventions and presents performances using these interfaces.

Song has held a solo exhibition titled From Here to There Then From There to Here (distant.gallery, Seoul/online, 2022) and participated in several group exhibitions, such as Doosan Art Lab Exhibition 2024 (Doosan Gallery, Seoul, 2024), The Many Faces of Home lighting show (The Heckscher Museum, New York, 2023), Provisional Space (Hek, Basel, 2023), Helsinki Biennial (Helsinki, 2023), and Istanbul Biennial (Istanbul, 2022).

Performance for Gathering 2025: I’m aging like a Russian nesting doll

This work presents the artist’s personal and autobiographical reflection on aging through a performance using a web browser. For the artist, aging is not simply about maturing, but rather a journey of continually adding new layers, like a Russian nesting doll. This performance consists of a first-person performer (the artist herself), a camera, a website, and a computer and screen projecting this website.

The artist feels a growing difficulty in making voluntary decisions and tries different methods of communication to listen to the inner voice, such as giving equal voting rights to the multiple inner selves, combining their opinions to reach a conclusion, or sometimes relying entirely on the voice of one particular self. Through these efforts, the artist realizes that what is needed is conversation for the sake of conversing, not for the sake of finding answers. Through countless inner conversations, the artist comes to a deeper understanding of self and reflections on life.

The artist visualizes and embodies this process of inner exploration in the web space. The pop-up windows generated by the artist’s gestures are voices of the younger self that have been neglected, the sound of memories that remain in the subconscious. The space of the web browser becomes a stage on which the artist’s inner conflicts, otherwise invisible, are revealed. While on stage the performer walks calmly through the space without saying a word, in the web space the internal confusion, conflicts, and clashes triggered by the performer’s gestures are vividly shown. Soon the web space becomes an autobiography written with the body, where anonymity and individuality become ambivalent and the conversation is configured anew.

This profile was last updated on the 18 February 2025.