Sungsoo Kim

I see my artistic process as being involved with a type of recycling, specifically the reuse of Styrofoam packaging materials to create art. I think that one of the artist’s most important roles is to reveal the hidden value inherent within a particular object. By framing the object in a new way, the artist can challenge viewers to rethink the value of everyday objects and encourage them to find aesthetic pleasure in the most seemingly mundane places. In my own work, the recycling of industrial and consumer by-products has led to two distinct avenues of exploration. One is the search for something inherently artistic in industrial waste materials, and the other is the creation of a wholly new aesthetic value out of the formal elements present within this waste. This last involves a kind of rearranging and refining of the existing formal elements to create a new gestalt.

In my work with Styrofoam I try to find something concealed in it. The explicit purpose of this material is to protect products while they are in-transit from production and storage facilities to the consumer. As such, this material has a vital role in the economic machine, but ultimately it becomes trash, waste. Its only value is conferred to it by the market value of the product it protects. That value is lost as soon as the product it protects is removed. The depreciation is astronomical from a consumer-commodity standpoint, but I think there is still something valuable in it, that the packaging has value as an object itself. My work of recycling packing Styrofoam is then to seek the “value” which is unseen in its material reality. By taking advantage of a particular type of object – packing Styrofoam – I am rediscovering a concept of “object” that has been utilized in art since the turn of the twentieth century.

By a simple reframing of a common, expendable material like Styrofoam, the artist can encourage a reexamination of objects around us. In today’s society we often think that if something has fulfilled its use we should throw it away rather than try to find another use for it. Yet, finding new uses for discarded objects is one way to breathe life back into objects around us. To see art where others see trash is one thing, but to lead others to see that art for themselves is what artists have been engaged in since the turn of the century. Like many artists that have gone before, I can benefit from reusing recycled objects and materials, taking whatever medium I can find to create works of art. I choose to recycle or reinterpret not only for reflection on environmental issues, but also for fun, play, and ultimately art. It also challenges me to re-interpret the concept of the object, or to search for other artists’ concepts of the object.