Yehwan Song is a Korean-born artist based in New York who builds anti-friendly, non-user-centric websites alongside videos, kinetic sculptures and installations that question the internet's promise of freedom and connection.,Working across these forms, she examines how algorithms, interfaces and even words like 'cloud' and 'user' quietly naturalize surveillance and corporate control.,
In Oh Yes, Everything's Fine, shown in the 2024 exhibition “Web as a Medium” at NEORT++ in Tokyo and on objkt.one, she used the motifs of a PC desktop, windows and icons, to make her point that “the internet and social media, originally conceived as democratic arenas for free expression, have often been perverted into tools of manipulation, veiling genuine emotions and frustrations”.Her 2024 video installation (Whose) World (How) Wide Web, shown at the Asian Art Biennial in Taichung, built a giant Korean keyboard and browser windows that switch between Korean and English to point at the internet's English-dominated infrastructure.
For the Helsinki Biennial in 2023 she worked with the University of Zurich's Digital Visual Studies project on Newly Formed, a site that lets visitors explore the Helsinki Art Museum's public art collection through an interactive map built with machine learning.In her first institutional solo show, “Are We Still (Surfing)?” at Pioneer Works in New York, video projections and kinetic sculptures built around dripping copper pipes and looping whirlpools depicted the internet as a closed, algorithm-driven system rather than a space users can freely navigate.The Barnacles (2025), shown at G Gallery in Seoul, compares internet users to barnacles: sessile creatures passively filter-feeding on the currents that reshape them.,
She studied at ECAL in Lausanne before pursuing an MFA at Columbia University's School of the Arts, class of 2026.,The Museum of the Moving Image paired her with the artist Sarah Friend on Lick Pic, a Media Wall commission developed with the Tezos Foundation.
