Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries Presents: Down in Fukuoka with the Belarusian Blues (Sagan dong)

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries Presents: Down in Fukuoka with the Belarusian Blues (Sagan dong)

Seoul, South Korea Thursday, October 7, 2010–Sunday, November 7, 2010

The controversial new masterpiece that everybody's talking about -- everybody who's anybody. It's the best entertainment in town -- and Seoul is a big town.

DOWN IN FUKUOKA WITH THE BELARUSIAN BLUES is a translation from French into English and a transposition to the present of a sworn deposition made on July 18, 1873, by an 18-year-old French poet, Arthur Rimbaud. In his testimony, he recounts his dramatic confrontation with another French poet, Paul Verlaine, then 29. The scene takes place in a cheap hotel in Brussels. Verlaine, drunk, enraged, and holding a handgun, fires on Rimbaud, wounding him in the wrist, while Verlaine's mother sits alone in the bedroom.

DOWN IN FUKUOKA WITH THE BELARUSIAN BLUES unfolds in several animated texts, each one a projection or on an LED screen in the gallery spaces. An original music soundtrack accompanies each work.

DOWN IN FUKUOKA WITH THE BELARUSIAN BLUES suggests that, like everyone, the poet and the artist wound and are wounded. They act out flaws. And they refocus everyday griefs in poetry and art that, far from depressing, exalt us with an emotional history more vital and enduring than all other histories.

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES is yhchang.com. Its principals, Young-hae Chang (Korea) and Marc Voge (U.S.A.), are based in Seoul. YHCHI has made work in 16 languages and presented much of it at some of the major art institutions in the world, including commissioned works for Tate, London, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the New Museum, New York.