YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES (YHCHI) is a two-artist collective based in Seoul, South Korea. Using Flash animation techniques, they create fast-moving, text-based artworks that are synchronized with original scores. Using a seemingly simple format—texts on monochromatic backgrounds—YHCHI weaves complex and evocative narratives. Invoking the genre of film noir, and the hard-boiled literary styles of Raymond Chandler and Phillip K. Dick, YHCHI’s imaginative, witty and often politically pointed narratives offer layered and compelling stories in which identities are assumed and discarded, and ideologies of all persuasions are held up and questioned. For BLACK ON WHITE, GRAY ASCENDING, their project for the New Museum, the artists have expanded their usual single-channel format to create an unprecedented seven-channel installation that tells a chilling story of abduction and assassination from seven separate points of view, set to an eerily laid-back bossa nova score. The installation is at once as nostalgic as a 1960s suspense film and as current as the daily headlines.

BLACK ON WHITE, GRAY ASCENDING is organized by Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator, New Museum, and Lauren Cornell, Director, Rhizome.