Re: [-empyre-] Cunnilingus in North Korea

[YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES <tfa@chollian.net>]

Hi Paul,

"Can you comment on how national cultural agendas have influenced your work
(in contrast say to the influence of the contemporary political situation
-or- the western art world)?"

We can't say we pay much attention to any national cultural agenda. Do you
mean the fact that Korea is the most broadbanded country in the world? We
began to make Net art with a 56K modem. We've only had broadband for the
past year and a half.

Paradoxically, the 56K modem was a determining factor in our work: no
images. Broadband has spoiled Korean Web designers. They have no discipline.
No one outside the country can bring up half the Korean home pages.

Korea is also 99.999% PC country. We're the only Mac users here.

We began to make Net art not because the Korean government and Korean big
business pushed computers and the Internet (which it has been doing), but
because everything is big in Korea. Korea is a small country with big
ambitions. We wanted to make something small -- not for aesthetic but for
practical, economic reasons, because it seemed cheaper: no studio, no
materials except for a computer, a dial-up connection, a Flash program and a
Web domain. 

The Internet seemed to present the biggest bang for our buck. We still
believe this. The Internet has been good to us.

The Korean national cultural agenda is uninterested in artistic uses of the
Internet. That may be, come to think of it, why the Internet appeals to us:
because there are no other artists around us who are interested in it.

Young-hae and Marc



On 5/9/05 3:59 PM, "Paul Brown" <paul@paul-brown.com> wrote:

>> Did the Korean flag influence any of your public work?
>> 
>> Young-hae and Marc
> 
> Only as much as the trigrams (or their structure) have had a major
> influence on all my work.  So only indirectly.  But the flag did intrigue
> me and indicates that Korea has (or maybe had) a fairly close
> identification with a Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist ideology.
> 
> Can you comment on how national cultural agendas have influenced your
> work (in contrast say to the influence of the contemporary political
> situation -or- the western artworld)?