Yehwan Song (b. 1995) is a visual artist and web designer whose work critically examines the homogenized and standardized nature of the web environment. Challenging what is commonly accepted as "user-friendly" design—supposedly created for the convenience of users—she questions the very premise of usability.
 
Her work explores the anxiety and discomfort experienced by users marginalized by these standards, while also exposing the hidden mechanisms of control driven by aggressive algorithms and the profit motives of large corporations. Through websites, installations, and performances, Song reveals the underlying structures of the web that often go unnoticed.

Yehwan Song explains that her work, which centers around web design, led her to develop a skeptical and critical perspective on the internet environment and digital devices we often accept unconsciously. Rather than simply reproducing these problematic systems, she aimed to tell stories that reveal their underlying issues—an approach that naturally led her to explore web art and digital art.
 
Her practice began with disrupting the rigid standardization of conventional internet environments. Moving beyond the traditional interface conventions that rely on input and output through a mouse and keyboard, Song has developed works that connect the individual to the web through bodily movement and unconventional forms of interaction.

For example, in her web performance piece Cry Don’t Cry (2022), which unfolds within a web structure she designed herself, a gesture of tracing a finger from the eyes to the cheeks triggers the appearance of browser windows displaying the words “Cry” or “Don’t Cry.” As this gesture is repeated, the windows accumulate toward the bottom of the screen, layering over time.
 
Alongside this work, Song has introduced various other interactive, responsive pieces that enable direct engagement between the user and the web. In Speak Don’t Speak (2022), a web window displaying either “Speak” or “Don’t Speak” is repeatedly generated based on the size of the user’s mouth. In Soft Pocking (2022), streams of water shot at the screen from a water gun prompt the drawing of white lines. Through these works, Song continues to explore alternative modes of interaction that break away from conventional web interfaces.

Yehwan Song’s web environments do not function as conventional platforms for obtaining information or accessing the online world. Instead, they operate as intimate interfaces that react and transform in response to the user’s physical movements. These new forms of responsive web design challenge the limitations of standardized web environments—such as the constraints imposed by uniformity—and propose an alternative, more active internet space. In doing so, Song envisions a web that fosters diverse and liberated interactions between user and interface.

Furthermore, in woldeu waideu (2022), Yehwan Song exposes how restricted web environments impose generalized modes of interaction and visual perspectives, overlooking individual contexts and cultural differences. The projected images on multiple foam boards are composed of videos that, after being uploaded to and downloaded from various online platforms, have each been altered into different compression formats. These differently sized images suggest that, while users may be accessing the same web environment through the World Wide Web, they are in fact situated in distinct and varied realities.

Another key element in this work is the movement of the mouse, which circles endlessly within a fixed boundary around the images. The internet has long been perceived as a space of transnational connection—free from physical constraints and capable of infinite expansion and mobility.
 
However, through this repetitive, circular mouse movement, Song metaphorically reveals the reality that, despite the illusion of boundless navigation through the web, users are in fact confined within limited zones and exposed only to filtered information—trapped by algorithms engineered by powerful corporations.

Continuing this exploration, in her 2023 work Upload Type Grinding Evaporator, Song dismantles the optimistic belief in the infinite expansiveness of digital virtual space by exposing the repetitive and cyclical structures that underlie it. The piece creates a multilayered space where augmented reality and virtuality are interwoven—merging the figure on screen, the AR (Augmented Reality) marker captured by the camera, and the gaze of the viewer into a single, overlapping experience.

A structure placed at the end of the on-screen figure’s gaze is marked with an AR marker, which, when captured through a webcam, generates a virtual reality scene on another display in real time. In this process, the face—once gazing into physical space—is repeatedly fragmented, erased, and regenerated within the augmented reality constructed by the artist.
 
This cyclical pattern of creation and dissolution highlights the fragility and incompleteness of technological systems, playfully dismantling the optimistic faith in technological rationalism.

Meanwhile, (Whose) World (How) Wide Web (2024), presented at 《DOOSAN Art Lab 2024》, metaphorically reveals the limitations of language, characters, and devices used for communication and networking through the web. Structured like a large pop-up theater, the work unfolds as users interact with the browser and perform online actions. Below, texts appear projected through mapping technology onto a prompt screen.
 
This theatrical setup stems from the artist’s critical perspective on digital colonization. To enter any domain name unified under the English "www," users must press a language-switch key, and everything from email addresses to social media IDs must be written in English—rather than in their native language. While using internet infrastructures and major platforms built to the standards of the U.S. and Europe, we often conform to these systems without questioning what might be inherently flawed.

Yehwan Song addresses the numbness or ignorance that obscures this truth through the form of a theater. The online performance, set on a stage shaped like a keyboard, reveals users immersed in the web environment created by large corporations, unable to face reality. The prompt gently highlights the problems of social media and the broader internet environment.

In early 2025, at G Gallery, Yehwan Song continued her exploration of the relationship between users and platforms in her solo exhibition 《The Internet Barnacles》. In this show, she metaphorically depicted the internet environment as an ocean and today’s users navigating the vast web world as barnacles.
 
Song built the exhibition around the idea that although users believe they surf the web freely, in reality, they receive distorted and biased information shaped by algorithms created by large corporations. She saw how our bodies and consciousness gradually adapt to the flow of vast digital systems and how, by living closely together and exchanging information and data, we resemble barnacles—starting as free-swimming larvae, undergoing multiple transformations, then settling and clustering together on a surface.

The installation work The Barnacles (2025), created from this concept, consists of multiple square-cut pieces of cardboard assembled into a structure onto which video is projected. This modular installation simultaneously evokes the image of a cluster of barnacles and the arrangement of digital pixels.
 
This fragmented form metaphorically reveals a reality where, beneath the seemingly smooth interactions on the surface, predictive algorithms, surveillance, and data extraction mechanisms operate incessantly. The repeated projection of videos—created by the artist herself—across countless pieces of cardboard evokes our own state of drifting endlessly through infinite scrolling, oblivious to the hidden realities beneath.

Another work, The Whirlpool (2025), metaphorically represents the one-sided and biased flow of information driven by algorithms through a natural phenomenon. This piece creates a hypnotic vortex that reveals how algorithmic systems draw users into a continuous flow of content and interaction.
At the highest point of the work, information flows downward, moving unilaterally along the whirlpool. The images of people embedded in the cardboard at the bottom symbolize internet users who repeatedly absorb only the injected information.

The new work Internet Map (2025), presented at the 《Young Korean Artists 2025》 exhibition currently held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) in Gwacheon, offers a macroscopic view of the contemporary internet environment and visualizes the hidden side of capital intertwined with technology. In this work, she addresses how users lose their rights to navigate and become passive on the giant platforms of big tech companies that provide limited and distorted information.
 
She visualizes the phenomenon of the filter bubble — where internet information providers analyze users’ past activities and preferences to selectively offer information tailored to them — resulting in an online environment where users are exposed mostly to information that aligns with their tastes and beliefs rather than diverse perspectives. This is represented through a large-scale installation and a website.
 
Through this, the viewers are allowed to physically encounter how increasing dependence on platforms results in the commodification of user data and immersion in provocative or collectively distorted content. 

In this way, Yehwan Song has been proposing a new web environment that overturns limited languages and characters on the web, the accessibility constraints of digital devices, and standardized web design. Her work reminds contemporary people—who live navigating daily between online and offline worlds—of the overlooked realities and the internalized anxieties and discomforts these realities have created, prompting reconsideration of alternative internet environments.

 “Is the internet we are building now truly the internet we want?”  (Yehwan Song, from the interview with BE(ATTITUDE))

Yehwan Song graduated from the Department of Visual Design at Hongik University and is currently based in New York, where she continues her artistic practice. Her solo exhibitions include 《The Internet Barnacles》 (G Gallery, Seoul, 2025) and 《From here to there from there to here》 (Distant Gallery, Seoul/Online, 2022). She also presented a solo Focus Section presentation at Frieze New York 2025 in collaboration with G Gallery.
 
In addition, Song has participated in numerous group exhibitions such as 《Young Korean Artists》 2025 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, 2025), the 《24th SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition》 (SONGEUN, Seoul, 2024–2025), 《DOOSAN Art Lab 2024》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2024), 《2023 OLED Art Wave: Long Dream》 (Scène Seoul, Seoul, 2023), 《Provisional Space》 (Hek, Basel, 2023), the Helsinki Biennale (Helsinki, 2023), the Istanbul Biennale (Istanbul, 2022), 《The Pieces I Am》 (UCCA, Shanghai, 2022), and 《To You: move toward where you are》 (ARKO Art Center, Seoul, 2022), among others.
 
Song has also been selected for various residency programs, including ITP/IMA Project Fellowship (New York, 2023), Pioneer Works (New York, 2023), La Becque (Switzerland, 2022–2023), NewINC (New York, 2021–2023), and ZER01NE (Seoul, 2021–2022).

References

• 송예환, Yehwan Song (Artist Website)
• 비애티튜드, 창작자가 된 이유
• 국립현대미술관, [리플렛] 젊은 모색 2025 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), [Reflet] Young Korean Artists 2025)
• 비평웹진 퐁, 이미지가 과잉될수록 권력은 짙어진다: 송예환 작가의 작품을 중심으로 – 강아림
• 세계일보, 팬데믹이 부른 아이러니… “당신은 이동의 자유가 있나요”, 2022.03.17
• OLED ART WAVE, 롱 드림 (OLED ART WAVE, LONG DREAM)
• 두산아트센터, 두산아트랩 전시 2024 (DOOSAN Art Center, DOOSAN Art Lab Exhibition 2024)
• 지갤러리, 인터넷 따개비들 (G Gallery, The Internet Barnacles)
• 아르떼, "인터넷에 붙어 사는 인간들과 바다의 따개비는 다를 게 없다", 2025.01.15