Heige Kim

For the last six years, I have been collecting bottle caps, plastic vegetable wraps, boxes, bubble wrap, and non-recyclable detritus from my daily life. At first, I stored these items because I could not bear to have them end up in the ocean or landfills. I have created spaces for them around the house and the studio. These often colorful, once useful things that contained food, liquid, and non-essential items are now my subject and materials used to examine how a person’s life intersects with the public system. 

The research for the series, I make trash, mountain, and 34-Degrees latitude (Los Angeles), led me to follow the waste trail of the University of California, Los Angeles. The trail led me to a landfill in the hills of Simi Valley, the resource recovery center in San Fernando Valley, and a recycling center in Santa Monica. I utilized my collection of footage and photographs of the sites to convey my experiences through videos, installations, and performances. 

When I visited the landfill, I was surprised to find a peaceful valley. I was half expecting to see what I saw on YouTube videos of the mountains of trash in India, for instance. It wasn’t the case at all. It wasn’t stinky either. Many big semi-trucks that passed me on the freeway on my way to the landfill were actually trucks carrying trash from various transfer stations in Los Angeles. The trucks would go through the weigh station and slowly make it up the hill where two to three bulldozers were continually roving over the just dumped bags of garbage while compacting it down at the same time. The company utilized scents and industrial fans to blow the smell away from human dwellings. My visits to the recycling center and the recovery center where they process recyclables were just as awe-inspiring and impressive. Not only because of the way tons of garbage were processed daily but also because of how much human and machine labor it took to move, store, and transform our waste. 

While I am interested in the accumulation of trash, and the hidden labor behind our life, I am drawn to the moments when my perception of trash shifts and layers of meaning emerge, where the mundane, the individual choices, cultural, and ecological impacts oscillate without hierarchy. Through research, I seek to depict the space of construction and negotiation between reality, fiction, narrative, and the abstract. By mimicking reality, and by reframing what is found in life, I want to bring into question what is knowable or unknowable and explore our culture of hyper-consumerism and its socio-ecological impact. I want to use art to explore the possibility of shifting our perspective towards a world where our desires and endeavors do not trump the well-being of our environment and ultimately, towards influencing the power structure of our society to become more equitable.

Hee Jin Kim - heigekimstudio[@]gmail.com