“Using Tchaikovsky to Resist Hunger” is a painting created by Egg Young in 2021. Dominated by a bitter dark-green palette and incorporating digitally textured typography, the work reveals a spiritual barrenness through its minimalist visual language — a poignant reflection of contemporary youth’s survival strategies constructed through self-deprecating humor within an increasingly uncertain social landscape.

Egg Young’s creations remain fundamentally rooted in internet memes. These images undergo constant downloading, remixing, and recirculation across digital networks—a self-referential carnival where participants simultaneously create and critique. Defined as infinitely remixable visual templates, memes gain cultural currency precisely through their endless alterations and annotations in cyberspace: the more they’re modified, the greater their acceptance and popularity. While their content spans a broad spectrum, the majority encapsulate millennial skepticism and sense of powerlessness toward the external world.

Egg Young’s practice operates as a critical node within this digital meme ecosystem. His dual-coding methodology reconfigures web-based imagery through interdependent processes: while algorithmically remixing images according to subjective intentions, he simultaneously materializes them via tufting guns on textile grids—a tactical embrace of hand-coded imperfection. The deliberately retained dangling threads perform as material glitches, their chaotic falls mirroring the pixelation artifacts of compressed images while metaphorizing the overwhelming weight of digital affect. The sublime nature of oil painting is thus deconstructed into a myriad of pixelated dust.

Within these works—where digital revelry intertwines with visceral bitterness—resides the “collective unconscious” of the internet generation: a scathing parody of corporate-crafted consumerist lifestyles, an acquired immunity to semiotic dogma, and the categorical rejection of neoliberalism’s perpetually deferred illusions.