Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Song’s 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.

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

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.

Residencies (Selected)

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).

Originality & Identity

Yehwan Song’s practice begins with a critical reflection on standardized web environments and the hidden side of technological utopias. In works such as Cry Don’t Cry (2022) and Speak Don’t Speak (2022), she explores non-standard possibilities of web interaction by replacing conventional input devices like the mouse and keyboard with bodily gestures such as hand movements and mouth size. Through these approaches, Song questions the common assumption that web environments are designed for the user's convenience, revealing the invisible control mechanisms embedded within regulated design.

In woldeu waideu (2022), presented at ARKO Art Center, Song visualizes how the seemingly unified network of the web actually functions under vastly different conditions for each user. The projected videos, displayed on foam boards in varying compression formats, expose how the web’s promise of global integration in fact reinforces imbalance and information disparity. This critical perspective expands into the structural biases of algorithmic power that dominate the internet environment.

Through Upload Type Grinding Evaporator (2023), presented at DOOSAN Gallery, Song deconstructs the technological optimism surrounding the infinite expansibility of virtual space. By employing augmented reality and the process of repetitive creation and erasure, she explores the cyclical fiction of digital space. Here, her critical perspective on the utopian myth of technological progress deepens significantly.

In the new work Internet Map (2025), presented at 《Young Korean Artists 2025》 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon), Song visualizes the power structures of filter bubbles and platform capitalism with even greater precision, structuring the reality of big tech companies manipulating and commodifying user data through a web-based interactive system. She critically reconstructs how individual autonomy is increasingly marginalized under information consumption systems controlled by technological capital from a macroscopic perspective.

Style & Contents

From the beginning, Song’s formal experiments have focused on web-based performances and the development of non-standard interfaces. In Cry Don’t Cry (2022), browser windows multiply infinitely in response to hand gestures stroking the face, while in Speak Don’t Speak (2022), texts shift according to the size of the user's mouth. These bodily-web interaction systems—unfamiliar in conventional websites—formed the core sculptural language of her early works.

From woldeu waideu (2022), Song actively introduced projection mapping, foam boards, and physical installations to attempt a spatial transformation of the web interface. By visualizing the transformation, compression, and expansion of digital data as physical forms, she directly translates the internal data processing systems of online platforms into a visual language. From this stage, her works increasingly integrated the physical and web spaces into expanded installation formats.

In Upload Type Grinding Evaporator (2023), Song employs augmented reality (AR) and webcams to create a multi-layered interface that overlaps the viewer’s gaze with video imagery in real time. Through this, her interface experiments expand into realms of real-time feedback, loops of generation and erasure, and immersive hybrid realities.

In her solo exhibition 《The Internet Barnacles》 (2025) at G Gallery, works such as The Barnacles (2025) and The Whirlpool (2025) metaphorically translate algorithmic flows of information into ecological metaphors, using complex technical sculptural systems involving video, motors, Arduino, and projection mapping. In this way, Song’s formal experiments have continually expanded and converged, evolving from web-based coding to interactive media, augmented reality, and mechanical sculptural systems.

Topography & Continuity

Throughout her practice, Song has consistently maintained a critical gaze on the standardization and regulation of web environments, dissecting the mechanisms of digital power through a techno-aesthetic approach. Beginning with web-based performances, she has expanded her experimentation into projection mapping, augmented reality, physical installations, mechanical interfaces, and algorithmic calculations. Her method of visualizing hidden machinery and power structures within digital platforms through an organic sculptural language remains constant throughout her evolution.
Notably, works such as Internet Map (2025), (Whose) World (How) Wide Web (2024), and The Barnacles (2025) structurally traverse multilayered issues such as global digital colonialism and data power criticism, establishing Song’s own distinct language.

Looking ahead, Song is expected to continue deepening her critique of web interfaces, data infrastructures, and global platform ecosystems, further expanding her international presence within the global media art landscape through her aesthetic interventions into technological power.