Yehwan Song
Bio: Yehwan Song (b. South Korea) is an artist based in New York. Working across installation, performance, and web-based media, Song explores how digital culture reshapes perception, attention, and everyday life. Recent solo exhibitions include Are We Still (Surfing?) at Pioneer Works (New York, 2025) and The Internet Barnacles at G Gallery (Seoul, 2025). Song has participated in major exhibitions including the 17th Istanbul Biennial (2022), Helsinki Biennial (2023), and the Asia Art Biennale (Taichung, 2024), and presented work at the Museum of the Moving Image (New York, 2026). Upcoming presentations include the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, 2026) and a solo exhibition at Subtitled.nyc (New York, 2026).
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement:
Yehwan is a Korean-born, New York–based artist whose work approaches the web not as a neutral space, but as an environment shaped by historical, political, and economic forces. The internet appears weightless and open, yet it operates as infrastructure: structured around calculation, state surveillance, and the profit motives of governments and corporations. Rather than focusing on online content alone, Yehwan examines how interfaces, protocols, and terminology condition what the internet can be understood to be.
Terms such as “World Wide Web,” “cloud,” “streaming,” and even “user” function less as neutral descriptions than as metaphors that naturalize extraction, obscure ownership, and soften systems of control into the language of freedom and convenience. Yehwan treats language as a contested site, analyzing and rewriting these terms through counter- definitions and alternative vocabularies that foreground infrastructure, labor, and governance.
Tracing how the “user” shifted as the internet moved from a knowledge network to a system of consumption and data capture, Yehwan maps a progression from subject, to consumer, to a continuous source of behavioral data sustaining platforms and markets. Across websites, installations, sculptures, and performances, Yehwan introduces subtle frictions into seamless systems, making the web’s underlying structures visible again.
Yehwan Song
The Price, 2026
Wood, stainless steel, plastic, motors, and phone
Courtesy of the artist
&
Adrenaline, 2026
Wood, cardboard, stainless steel, plastic, paper, motors mirror, rubber, LED display, and phone
Courtesy of the artist
First Year Exhibition
Yehwan Song
Loop, 2025
Tablet, copper pipe, motor, Arduino, stainless
pipe, and rubber
Courtesy of the artist