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The current geological age is unofficially known as the Anthropocene, or, as some would prefer to call it, the Capitalocene. Waste production exponentially grew in the 20th century, commensurately with the rapidly expanding capitalist industry, to reach a critical point by the early 21st century. News stories and reports about the global waste crisis and plastic in the ocean have become daily occurrences. In the art world, as though in a sign of things to come, old and worn-out objets and artworks deceptively looking like discarded goods or downright junk have been making their way into exhibition venues at an increasing frequency. As these kinds of artworks are generally not familiar, recognizable styles like junk art, they are often extremely hard to tell apart from actual trash. There are a few known cases in which works like these were mistaken for trash and chucked into the garbage by cleaning staff of art galleries. Why do these artists keep dragging detritus and waste materials into exhibition venues? What exactly do they see in them? How does the trash we discard become a lofty piece of art in their hands? This issue is an earnest attempt to find answers to some of these questions.

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To look for answers to these questions, we met with artists who work mostly with things that have become obsolete, abandoned, or are becoming forgotten. Objects that were unearthed, harvested, and rescued from desolate edges of capitalist society such as landfills, scrap yards, and redevelopment sites are arranged in a certain order or combined with other objects and are given a new life as art, all the while retaining their timeworn quality. Interestingly, none of the artists we met consider these materials as refuse. For artists who are a bit of outsiders in the efficiency-worshipping capitalist society, there is no such thing as trash that must be carted away (one of the artists even stated that he could be abandoned like trash, while another said that if he considers anything trash, it would rather be brand-new products overflowing in supermarkets). Hence, according to these artists, “This is not trash.” Rather, they are resources that support everyday life, indicators for social ecosystems, and memories and residues of life that define us. When they become part of an artwork through combination with objects that are created by artists or other newer objects, they function as communication tools that help develop positive relationships with people.

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In addition to the statements of nine artists, this issue features an analysis dissecting the phenomenon of “perfectly good junk” and a discussion about the history of nontraditional art media and their significance by a critic who also rejects the term “trash” but feels uneasy about a certain type of object becoming the “brand” of an artist. Whether junk-based “postproduction” art can resonate with us as art that echoes and reorganizes our mode of being in the world is for the reader to judge. Notwithstanding, if more people embrace, and give visibility to, trash as do these artists, perhaps there is a hope that the Anthropocene will be stymied in its progress.

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In The 『Consumer Society』, Jean Baudrillard wrote: “Tell me what you throw away, and I’ll tell you who you are!” Following the same logic, one could say: “Tell me what you pick up, and I’ll tell you who you are (what type of artist you are)!”

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Choi Jeonghwa — Trash as Resources that Support Everyday Life

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In 1961, Choi was born in Seoul. He majored in painting at Hongik University. During his final year in college, he won the top prize at the JoongAng Fine Arts Competition with his Body series. He likes to refer to himself as “japga,” which means “jack of all trades.” As the founder of the Gasum Visual Development Laboratory, he has been literally involved in all forms of art, including interior design, graphic design, and art direction for films, except fine arts. As a familiar face in major art biennales around the world, Choi leads an active creative career.

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Choi Jeonghwa x Antenna Shop

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An old Western-style home sticks out like a sore thumb in a neighborhood crowded with newly built townhouses. This is Choi’s “Antenna Shop,” located in Yeonji-dong, Jongno. Countless things inhabit this place. Although much smaller than “Cheorin,” his Paju studio, which is almost like a factory in its scale and size, objects amassed here—each of them is “like a teacher” for him—are just as impressive. These objects “thoroughly matured and cured by time” were unearthed in junkyards, ancient art dealers’ shops, or markets or were found on the streets. For Choi, they are “history, records, and memories of the past.” This everyday universe feeds his art in its most unfiltered form.

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In the 1990s, he started collecting discarded plastic pieces. He collected artificial flowers, live flowers, and seed bags—in short, anything that resonates, vibrates, or attracts. This hoarding habit goes all the way back to his childhood. As a tiny tot, he was already collecting junk. In sum, everyday life and art have never been separate for him.

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Once he was on the road, visiting junkyards across the country in search of dishes, he was driving at 100 kph when he suddenly turned around. While dashing through the road, he spotted a treasure. He and his team “Cheorin” freed a large, well-shaped, and well-cured Styrofoam buoy from the net covering it by cutting the cords. This nature-made sculpture was later turned into a tower. On his discovery mission around the clock, he is always on the lookout for something and anything interesting. Not long ago, while heading back to his studio after his lunch, he came across a broken concrete post lying on the ground. “Amazing!,” he exclaimed. No sooner had he said this that the complete picture of the work he would make with the concrete post emerged in his mind. Luckily, he was out in his pickup truck and was able to haul his precious find to his studio and turn it into art. Then again, even without the pickup truck, the concrete post was probably fated to become, in one way or another, art in his hands.

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He simply arranges the materials he collects in a certain order or stack them on top of one another to create a certain shape. Sometimes, he does this together with other people. There are times when these objects come together on their own. “I do not need to do anything. They just nicely play together,” says the artist. In the never-ending cycle of production and consumption, Choi captures “life” in “the most life-like fashion” as would a taxidermist with the body of an animal, to store it in a time capsule. He has been doing this for 30 years, he says. This persistence appears to be precisely what it takes to be an artist who meaningfully unwraps the dark side of the consumer society.

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“I think art is about asserting oneself, understanding others, and finding a common voice for oneself and others. There is nothing really fancy about this view,” he comments. According to Choi, art is “almost nothing yet everything.” This is perhaps the reason that the aura of his art has been, all this time, locked inside words like plastic, junk, or trash. At this instant, where the ordinary overlaps with the spectacular, either by glittering objects from our everyday environment suddenly seeming like a giant spectacle or a giant spectacle suddenly appearing like an ordinary scene of life, this unfamiliarity may very well make us feel sick.

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The artist working on 〈Dandelion〉 at the yard of the Cheorin studio in Paju

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Min Sung Hong—Trash as an Indicator for the Social Ecosystem

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In 1972, Min was born. He studied Western-style painting at Chugye University for the Arts and earned a master’s degree in painting from San Francisco Art Institute. He has had 12 solo exhibitions in Korea and the United States of America, the last one of which was recently held at Art Space Hue. Min also exhibited in the 2018 Gwangju Biennale and the 2017 Cheongju Craft Biennale. Currently, he is an artist-in-residence at Seoul Art Space Geumcheon.

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Min Sunghong, 〈Horizontal Imbalance_Vertical Boundary〉, 2018. An assemblage made of a steel tower, cast iron bell, and found dining table legs.

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When working, I always try to keep in mind the fact that things around me are not just innocuous objects but can be revealing reflections of myself. While focusing on changes in everyday life situations of individuals and their experiences, I try to form a relationship with records of past events and things in my surroundings to create a structure that is spatiotemporally stratified for my art to have a social significance.

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By moving to the United States of America, I was exposed to an entirely new culture and environment. I have lived in several different places in the USA. As I moved from one place to another, I was always struck by this familiar yet strange feeling. It is this interest in the familiar yet strange or the strange yet familiar that inspired me to work with found objects. In 〈Island〉 (2004–2008), I display photos of 〈objets〉 I made inside various frames, of the kind that could have been used for family photos, which I found around my studio and modified. After my return to Korea in 2010, I went through again a period of instability and stress, as I adapted to the new environment. I leave things that I do not frequently use in boxes to be ready for pick up and go at a moment’s notice, should I need to move again. 〈Overlapped Sensibility(U-HAUL Box, Photos)〉 (2012) is a work made by tearing the old photos I came upon inside a cardboard box during a move into small pieces and reassembling them into the shape of the box in which it was found.

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More recently, I carried out three space installation works, 〈Dasirak〉, 〈Rolling on the Ground〉, and 〈Fence Around〉, which visualize the situation in which people living in today’s society find themselves, characterized by extreme stress and anxiety caused by the excess of stimuli and rapid changes in the external environment. Objets used in these installations are things that were left behind by families who were forced to leave their homes because of redevelopments, such as furniture, household items, clothes hangers, or framed oriental landscape paintings. These objets were brought together either in a manner to give each of them an independent direction of movement or by setting them up on a stage in a theatrical fashion.

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The bird-like shape, which is an important element of these installations, is a metaphor of sort, which stands for the artist or people in a society undergoing changes under the influence of their environment. A particular focus is placed on the beak of the bird, as different species of birds evolved to have different types of beaks under the influence of the feeding habit, climate, or the environment.

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Everyday life, although it be life itself, can also impose severe constraints on us. These works tell stories about invisible interactions and personal identity through objects that people lost or had to abandon because an unfair system that forced them to move out of their homes. These objects that were left behind now seem devoid of memories of their erstwhile owners and stripped of their function. However, by collecting and modifying these objects and assembling them in a new way, the three installations show how even constraints of reality that bring anguish to us can be precious insofar as they are part of our lives. - From the artist’s statement

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Min Sunghong, 〈Dasirak〉, 2016. Ceramic, found objets, color on wood, wheels, light, on display at the Gyeonggi Museum of Art.

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Lee Wan — Trash as Excess Energy

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In 1979, Lee was born in Seoul. He studied sculpture at Dongguk University. He was one of the artists featured in Counterbalance, the Korean pavilion exhibition in the Venice Biennale 2017. With “system” and “force majeure” as his bywords, Lee has created works on such themes as groups and their members, systems and norms, capitalism and labor or imperialism, and postcolonialism, which are relentless attacks on the symbolic order.

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Lee Wan — Trash as Excess Energy

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There’s a video piece entitled 〈DEI-GRATIA〉 (2008). One day, I found a dead sparrow on my porch and brought the carcass into my studio along with the paper cup and small packaging box lying near it to incorporate them all into my work. These were things that have finished serving their purposes, beings no longer holding utility or exchange value. I ruminated about what would come after death.

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To me, the act of bringing a found object home is like picking a word from which to develop a new meaning. As a human, I discover and draw from the social history embedded in the object to relate it to other ideas. Just as a dead sparrow is called a sparrow though it is no longer, discarded objects are still referred to as the names given to them during their lifetime.

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Discarded pieces of junk are, in fact, things expired of economic value, declared useless in terms of capitalist standards. Within the system run by the law of supply and demand, by-products expired of necessity, regardless of their nature and significance, have their signified meanings ruthlessly dismantled by the shredder’s soulless and monstrous teeth, then recycled to repeat incarnation. They might be reborn as ornaments on pricey luxury handbags if they’re lucky, although that does not promise eternal life either. Embedded in a manufactured product not only lies data of its previous owners, but also the history of mankind in general. My intention was to visualize through the manmade products how humans have come to corner themselves into an inextricable position within their own system.

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Humankind has entered the age of surplus and all surpluses created by humans threaten their very existence. In addition to psychological anguish such as senses of deprivation and isolation, extreme price competition eats away at human rights and environmental pollution threatens survival itself. The Early Anthropocene Hypothesis, which deems the recent times as a period of extinction, forces a change of perspective regarding the present. The scope of my concern stretches from “problems that require joint effort to solve” to “internal conflicts of individuals.”

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We can easily conjecture what it is that humanity has longed for and what kind of future life it’s headed towards, simply by looking at the ingredient list labeled on a food product. But did we really want this? Is what I want what I genuinely want? I get lost chasing a chain of questions when I see all the surplus items piled up at the waste disposal sites and supermarkets. 〈Life is widely spreading blood-red ripples〉 (2018) might be a piece that best-represents these questions: I bought chicken from a supermarket, ground and reprocessed it into a baseball—this was in order to question if it’s really a personal and authentic desire to “crave pajeon (green-onion pancakes) on a rainy day,” or if the desire is deeply associated with the saying. Could art be an alternative solution to all human problems when we’re still mid-evolution with survival instinct remaining as a top priority? I believe good art conjures questions that lead to the root of it all, and I hope that my hand-processed found objects trigger questions about life. - From the artist’s statement

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Lee Wan, 〈How to Become Us, 5.06kg 1~60〉, 2011. Objets with equal weights installed in balance.

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Read this article : This Is Not Trash (1), This Is Not Trash (3), This Is Not Trash (4), This Is Not Trash (5)

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※ This content was first published in the April, 2019 release of Wolganmisool Magazine and has been re-published on TheARTRO.kr after a negotiation was reached between Korea Arts Management Service and Wolganmisool Magazine.