From Surfing to Sinking in the Internet: Yehwan Song
Yehwan Song, Are We Still (Surfing)?, 2025. Installation at Pioneer Works. Courtesy of the artist and Pioneer Works. Photo by Olympia Shannon.
The end of the 20th century saw the dramatic rise of new media art. Artists like Shu Lea Cheang and Maurizio Bolognini were carving the canyon of artistic commentary on the early internet. Their works reflected a moment in time that looked toward a boundless potential: “surfing” the web was a radical act of agency and interpersonal connection. New media art in the ’80s and ’90s placed viewers as participants with control over the still-forming landscape. It was an anticipatory time; limitless possibilities of connection and knowledge were beyond most people’s everyday understanding. Surfing the web suggested a ride that could mean anything and lead anywhere.
Fast forward to 2025, and Yehwan Song’s solo exhibition at Pioneer Works, Are We Still (Surfing)?, provides clear reasons that the answer to the titular question is, in fact, no. Through an installation consisting of kinetic, digitally-enhanced structures and video projections, the Pioneer Works resident alum reflects on our new passivity in the commercialized saturation of our digital spaces. Where we once surfed, explored, and pioneered, we now sit back and sink.
Yehwan Song, Are We Still (Surfing)?, 2025. Installation at Pioneer Works. Courtesy of the artist and Pioneer Works. Photo by Olympia Shannon.
Upon entering the show, visitors are met with a bright blue projection on a wall, where a looping figure rendered over multiple floating digital window screens tries to stay afloat. Bubble JPEGs emphasize the drowning until eventually the figure plugs its nose, surrendering to the descent. Words like “persuasion,” “radicalization,” and “subscription” pop up at the top, forming a suffocating barrier that traps the figure below. This work sets a strong tone for Song’s stance on our lack of control in the digital world.
In a nearby corner, a chest-height fountain hums, composed of copper pipes and tiered iPhones, cascading water. Bright, colorful screens mimic drops and ripples that cannot truly penetrate. The contraption is uncanny, odd in its material makeup of contradicting rustic pipes, plastic funnels, and modern technology. An artificial meditativeness emerges between the noise of the motor, the mesh of materials, and the mimicry of elemental motion.
Yehwan Song, Are We Still (Surfing)?, 2025. Installation at Pioneer Works. Courtesy of the artist and Pioneer Works. Photo by Olympia Shannon.
It’s around the corner where three large sculptures–all made of interlocking cardboard—serve as the anchors of the installation. Projections bathe them in bright, looping videos. Digital windows pass thoughts between mouths and ears, someone weeps tears of open tabs, and pop-ups with commercialized phrases like “WATCH MORE” overlay views of hands or people feigning interaction with them.
There’s a quiet echo of Sarah Sze in their motion, scale, and grid logic. Yet Song more explicitly uses technology in an erroneous way, emphasizing its inability to be engaged with. There is a near taunting of having images compressed and looped so closely to us without our say. A wheel of touchscreen styluses mechanically spins, endlessly swiping through images on an iPhone. The large scale of the structures highlights our confusion in a search for participation or a way to “use.” But Song offers us no participation; instead, a confrontation. These are no longer tools—they’re self-sufficient mirrors.
The use of water as a motif throughout the installation, with visuals of waves, tidepools, and surfing, goes beyond the hyperbole of surfing the web. In water’s symbolization of freedom and fluidity, Song highlights our current drowning and loss in the digital space. Once fantastically spacious and unseized, the internet has become a maze of auto-playing visuals and “Buy Now!” buttons.
Yehwan Song, Are We Still (Surfing)?, 2025. Installation at Pioneer Works. Courtesy of the artist and Pioneer Works. Photo by Olympia Shannon.
Not every element lands. In some moments, work veers too close to literal. Pop-ups within the projections, flashing words like “manipulation” or “polarization,” while thematically aligned, can feel redundant next to more compelling visual methods of communicating the same concept nearby. Borrowing commonly used phrases from algorithmic governance makes sense, and redundancy there can even feel like a necessary exploration of the topic. Referring to the governance itself as “manipulating” or “polarizing,” however, feels untrusting of the audience’s intelligence, given the now-indelible human experience of technology. Song is at her strongest when she shows instead of tells.
The ambition of this show is undeniable. The third floor of Pioneer Works has transformed into a strange, unplaceable timezone: low-resolution images and garish text design call to the early internet, while current technology and themes of surveillance and internet commodification pin it firmly in the now. One of the most stand-out projected phrases, “(WHOSE) WORLD (HOW) WIDE WEB,” turns us toward a looming technological future that is proving difficult to navigate and escape. Where so many early new media artists used the budding Internet of their time as a landscape of limitless possibilities and self-agency, Song is holding up the screen not as a new portal, but as a mirror to our digital passivity.
In Are We Still (Surfing)?, the answer may be no—but Song poses an even more generative question within the installation: not whether we’re sinking, but how far down we will go.
Yehwan Song, Are We Still (Surfing)?, 2025. Installation at Pioneer Works. Courtesy of the artist and Pioneer Works. Photo by Olympia Shannon.
Yehwan Song: Are We Still (Surfing)? is on view at Pioneer Works from February 8 through May 11, 2025.
Edited by Jubilee Park
