Dear Messrs. Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries
A love letter expressing respect and affection for Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries.
He decided it would be best to send another letter. It had been about five years since the first. Could anything be more foolish or make one feel smaller than sending another letter after receiving no reply? But bringing personal feelings into running a company is not particularly helpful. One must separate oneself thoroughly from the company, carry out company plans as planned, and try again at what has not been achieved. Until the notice of business closure is filed. In other words, the question is one of perspective.
In 2015, he abruptly founded the company by introducing it, and almost simultaneously set up its official website. Having assembled the minimum trappings of a company, all that remained was to invite people he respected to serve as non-executive outside directors. He naturally recalled the lobby of the Rodin Gallery, which he had visited in 2004. Beside the French sculptor Auguste Rodin’s La Porte de l’Enfer, nine Zipel “internet” refrigerators were stacked in three columns. The monitors built into their refrigerator panels were filled with love and devotion for a particular subject. Above all, the sight taught him that the web could do quite a lot beyond making a beloved friend happy. In many ways, they were more than qualified to become the company’s non-executive outside directors. The moment he decided to write to them, their wishes became a matter for later.
The letter, long enough to fill twenty sheets of manuscript paper with two hundred characters each, began: “Dear Young-hae Chang, CEO, and Marc Voge, Chief Knowledge Officer of Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, Hello. I am…” It ended: “Sincerely, Min Guhong, operator of Min Guhong Manufacturing.” After sending it, he spent some time considering how to put their titles on the business cards he would give them. “Young-hae Chang, CEO of Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, Non-Executive Outside Director of Min Guhong Manufacturing? Marc Voge, Chief Knowledge Officer of Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, Non-Executive Outside Director of Min Guhong Manufacturing?” Adding contact information and an English version would probably make the cards cramped. Had they been conscious of this too? Even several years after the letter was sent, the moment to present the cards had not arrived.
The content was not much different this time, but he gave it a new order, turning the letter itself into a website and adding a few rather conspicuous devices. The text and background colors change randomly, so that each viewing feels new in some way, and the timing of the text’s appearance and disappearance is proportional to the length of each phrase. Elaborations attached to the main text appear at 25 percent of its size, while the arrangement of drums and hi-hats played according to the nature of each phrase produces an uneventful, occasionally subversive soundtrack. “I offer this merely for your information, not out of any doubt about either of your reading abilities.”
The year he sent the second letter, 2020, may have been meaningful for them. At the end of that year, development and support for Flash, which they had favored since beginning their practice in earnest in 1999, ended completely. First released by Macromedia in 1996, Flash was widely used for more than twenty years in web design, animation, games, advertising, and other fields. Early YouTube video technology also ran on Flash, and Kakao maintained its Flash-based desktop map service until December 2020. But some people had long pointed out that Flash depended on a particular company, consumed excessive computer resources, and, above all, was vulnerable to security problems. On April 29, 2010, Apple’s Steve Jobs finally explained in Thoughts on Flash why his company had removed traces of Flash from its products, defining it as a relic of a bygone era. “In many ways, Flash was a technology that should have disappeared long ago.” Was it around then? Their works began appearing on Vimeo as video files instead of Flash files, SWF.
The letter, which formally follows some of their methods, runs on the web’s most elementary and fundamental computer languages: HTML, HyperText Markup Language, CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, and simple JavaScript. He chose a website as the letter’s form because he hoped to see them enjoy—or scoff at—its code. This, too, was an expression of respect and, further, love. The letter thus repeats until the web browser is closed. At least as long as the server runs, until their reply arrives, or even after the notice of business closure is filed.
He is waiting for a reply to the second letter. If no reply comes this time, could it be because of the music? Meanwhile, there was a rumor that someone else who had written to them received the following reply: “Just think of us as dead!”
The letter was originally to be presented as an additional product of his company in Publishing as Method, held at Art Sonje Center from October 30 to December 20, 2020, but scheduling issues prevented this. Still, if the product has reached its intended end user, its duty is already fulfilled.