FOR A GREENER TOMORROW ART FOR CHANGE: “FOR A GREENER TOMORROW” GROUP EXHIBITION 03. 2024
@ GALLERY ROYAL, SEOUL
PARTNERS: TREE PLANET (ENVIRONMENTAL NGO) AND ROYAL & CO.
I took part as an exhibiting artist in For a Greener Tomorrow, a group fundraising exhibition organized in partnership with Tree Planet and Royal & Co. The exhibition aimed to raise awareness and support for climate change adaptation, public health, and sustainability education in underserved communities. The funds raised went to educational and healthcare initiatives for local children through the Busungu Community Center in Tanzania.
My contribution was a series of works titled Art of Problem Solving. The series approached environmental sustainability through recycled materials and everyday symbols of reuse, recycling, and resource conservation. Instead of treating environmental issues as abstract concerns, I treated them as design and engineering challenges that call for creativity, experimentation, and practical solutions. Across the series, I looked for new uses for discarded materials, so viewers could see sustainability as a problem-solving process and not only an environmental goal.
In recognition of its contribution to environmental and humanitarian causes, our group received an official Certificate of Appreciation from the Busungu Community Center.
The exhibition connected art with issues like sustainability, public health, and environmental responsibility, and it brought together artists, nonprofit organizations, and industry partners to do it.
Besides showing my work, I talked with visitors about the ideas behind the pieces, including how recycling and reuse shaped their design and construction. Those conversations showed how climate, health, and education connect, and how art can make those topics easier for people to approach. Taking part made me want to keep making work that goes beyond looks and deals with real problems, and it showed me how much an exhibition like this gains when artists and organizations work together.
These are some 3D rendering I did in Rhino 3d based on the various recycling symbols all over the world.
The idea behind the pieces was around the phrase “Third times a charm”. I chose it as references the three cycles of recycling and also the world’s push on recycling and saving our planet. All of the symbols are refrigerator magnets and during the gallery we managed to sell all of the pieces.
Recycling Work
Every piece in my Recycling Magnet Series sold during the exhibition. These are the completed pieces.
I started by building Rhino 3D models based on recycling symbols used around the world, then turned the designs into hand-painted refrigerator magnets. The idea came from the phrase “Third Time’s the Charm,” which I connected to the three-arrow recycling symbol and to the ongoing global effort to reduce waste through reuse and recycling.
To reinforce the message, I built the frames from discarded Kurly delivery boxes instead of buying new materials. The magnets were designed to sit on a refrigerator door, where they act as small, everyday reminders of recycling and environmental responsibility.
Utilizing recycled cardboard boxes from a daily food delivering service called Kurly as to not waste these boxes by turning them into frames. I hand painted them using porcelain paints so that they could keep their colour for a long duration of time. They are designed to be fridge magnets so that they could remind you of recycling every time you passby your fridge.
The Terran Question (2024)
The Terran Question is one of my works in Art of Problem Solving, an exhibition about creative and artistic solutions to environmental issues. The exhibition centers on waste collected from the factory of Royal & Company, the largest bathroom company in the country, and the works use that material to raise awareness of pollution and sustainability.
The piece takes the form of a giant question mark, representing the uncertainty over how society will meet future environmental challenges. I built the frame from leftover wood collected from local factories and worked with Royal & Company to obtain defective ceramic products that would otherwise have been discarded. I broke the ceramics into fragments, arranged them to form the question mark, and filled the interior with stone and preserved moss. The idea came from the fact that environmental problems resemble complex puzzles, which take creativity and persistence to solve.
The materials were reclaimed instead of manufactured for the project, so shaping and assembling them took a lot of experimentation. I built the piece entirely from discarded materials so that the process itself would reflect the themes of reuse, sustainability, and environmental responsibility.
I used leftover wood that I gathered from factories to build the frame. Working in part with the Royal & Company, which makes sinks, toilet, etc. I went to the factory and took the defective products to break and create these pieces. I hot glued them to a cut out of the symbol and lined the edges up like walls with the broken pieces, symoblizing the idea of reuse and recycle. Due to the materials being leftovers I had to use much more extreme methods to shape the materials to the desired shapes.