The Brooklyn Rail

At Yehwan Song’s exhibition Are We Still (Surfing)?, interfaces explode in gridded sculptures and few but mighty works transport viewers to a technological dystopia in which they will likely recognize themselves. When entering the installation of video projections and kinetic sculptures on the third floor of Pioneer Works—a rustic, wooden space that, in Red Hook, feels worlds away from New York City—the viewer is greeted with a projected video of moving web frames positioned on a stark blue backdrop, also called Are We Still (Surfing)? (2025). Each web frame builds to create the fragmented shape of a photograph; the face of a figure emerges in the grouping of web frames. Emoji bubbles float around the figure’s fragmented image in separate web pages, and the figure’s two hands, made up of more web frames, claw at the bubbles. The figure plugs her nose with one hand, while her other hand reaches out briefly, as if attempting to grip the viewer. Slowly, each frame of the figure’s face and body disappear until the final frame is left, revealing a section of the figure's body that is unrecognizable without its whole. The individual is dispersed across web pages, drowned in them, and eventually overcome as they disappear in web page oblivion.

Past Are We Still (Surfing)? is the work In stream (2025), a sculptural system that pumps water through copper pipes, hitting smartphones on the way down. Though the intended effect of the smartphones as a closed feedback loop was missed by me (I visited when no water was running), it did leave me with the feeling that something I wanted to happen wasn’t happening—that the spout had run dry, which on its own, is a metaphor for the dissatisfaction that many internet users are faced with, whether through the oddities of targeted ads or the monotonous addiction of the mysterious “algorithm.”

Moving past In stream (2025), the viewer’s senses are submerged with three grid-like structures that make up “The Whirlpools Beneath” (2024–25), a three-work series. Each structure, made of cardboard and copper pipes, holds seemingly endless projections. The first structure, a coliseum-esque form surrounded by long petals of cardboard, is a stadium of perspective confusion—a bread and circus of media output. Images projected onto the structure include dynamic hands, faces, and images of water and whirlpools. The viewer is exhausted by images and perspectives. Jutting levels suggest pathways to connection, but which levels are the actual cardboard structures and which are just projections is unclear. Like the internet, there is an ungraspable, continuous movement to The Whirlpools Beneath—a technological breath pattern. With each subject taking shape on different planes, this limitless maze of information overload is disorienting. Cardboard is an apt, façade-like form that lends to the fleeting feeling of the web; the way the projections bring the cardboard to life makes one wonder what the work is without the projections—this limitless dream, the web, has a structure that feels unreachable, transformed by that which is placed on to it.

In the next piece in “The Whirlpools Beneath”, cardboard and pipes take the form of an apartment-like structure, with small, window-esque projections juxtaposed with larger boxes of projected faces and whirlpools. A nod to the overrun of corporate agents and advertising, like a Times Square nightmare, the piece is akin to a self imposed across billboards, commodifying quick loops of faces. In the next sculpture, a group of projections, arranged in a circle, loops a figure’s face as its gaze moves across the structure, another individual trapped in the veneer of a “free web.”

Song, a Korean-born, New York-based web artist, creates “anti-friendly, non-user-centric, unconventional, and diverse independent websites through which she tries to flip the general understanding of web design and subvert user behaviours.” Though not decidedly unfriendly, these works make clear that the viewer is not part of their systems, but rather a witness. The exhibition as a whole is a reminder that the internet is aging, and is no longer the friendly optimistic space with endless potential of the nineties dot-com boom, or the Buzzfeed/Tumblr era of the 2010s where the notion of content creators and influencers were born. Today’s internet is defined by its broken promises, corporate surveillance, and the illusion of choice. So, are we still surfing? Perhaps it’s more like we are swimming, trying to keep up with the waves of corporate oversight and data collection, more aware than we think that the end of something is near.