According to Whitehead, the obelisk erected by the River Thames in London is not an ‘object,’ but rather an ‘event.’ This idea is difficult to grasp; there is hardly any sense of the ‘ephemeral’ or ‘accidental’ to the famed Needle. It seems to be something that simply exists as such, not a phenomenon that suddenly occurs. However, Whitehead corrects this illusion under which our vision suffers. ‘An obelisk stands by the Thames’ is a state of affairs that only accrues meaning when set against a particular situational backdrop. At a time when the Earth has not yet even come into being, for example, this statement would neither be true nor false, simply incomprehensible. The same holds for 20 million years ago, before the River Thames began to flow, or for the early 1870s, during Whitehead’s own youth, since the obelisk was only moved to London from Alexandria between 1877 and 1878. The obelisk on the Thames, rather than being something that was always there, is something that came to be there. Its existence, its being, is temporary, ephemeral—and in the grander scheme of history, quite accidental. It must not be forgotten, moreover, that this structure is constantly undergoing a process of transformative generation as it loses a few molecules moment by moment.¹ The obelisk is happening. Being is event.

Sinyong Park’s work Daebu-Construction, Archive reminded me of a sliver of Whitehead’s metaphysics. In his work, space is deeply infiltrated by time, and presents itself as entirely taken over by eventness. Rather than an empty a priori form in which beings are held, space takes on a life of its own as that which emerges, is built (constructed), and is discarded (deconstructed) through the placement and interrelation of beings.

In 2019, the artist explored ghost-like places as he traveled around construction sites in Daebu-do (Daebu Island) and the areas surrounding Sihwa-ho (Sihwa Lake). The following images can be found in the onsite photography archives: abandoned buildings that look like ancient ruins, gaggles of vacation rental homes just being built, a clown statue with a sinister smile, middle and high schools under construction, overgrown shrubbery around the lake, old roads with weeds growing through their cracks, bleak views of islands and mud flats, stone mounds, gardens of naturalized plants growing on landfills, newly raised “New Town” apartment complexes, open-air exercise facilities in disuse…

Daebu-do, as many will know, is a kind of assembled space that connected previous islands such as Seongam-do, Bul-do, and Tan-do through land reclamation projects in the developmentalist phase of Korean history. This island called Daebu-do, which we may consider to have originally existed as such, is in fact a historically produced and socially fabricated place. It is a space constructed out of the dreams and desires of a certain era, and simultaneously a ‘place as event’ under transformation amid the traces of disillusionment that followed the shattering of those dreams.

Most of the scenes photographed by the artist are of abandoned, neglected places. The work does not include any humans. Gazing at the works, one may feel a bleak melancholy, and sometimes an eerie chill. The melancholy stems from the absence of humans, but the chill comes from the subtle sense that there are unseen beings at work, alive, in movement. In other words, these uninhabited, abandoned spaces are eerie not because they signify absence, but because they express the existence of that which is invisible: the sense of presence of the space itself—which would not have surfaced while it was being taken up and used by humans—or the extra-human powers that dwell therein. What may these powers be? The artist does not explicitly say. Instead, his photographs capture and show these powers as images. The strange images revealed by certain desolate, dry, corpse-like spaces, from which all previous humanly injected desires have drained away. Just as a certain tool may only show its true form to the human eye after its utility has expired, there are sensory moments exuding from a completely empty spatiality, the materiality of scenery that begins to reveal itself where humans have finally left.

This, then, may be the reason that Park paid such meticulous attention to the ‘construction site.’² A construction site is home to many elements that will disappear once the building structure has been completed. Dug-up earth, stacks of materials, floating dust, noise hallucinations that stay around after dark, electric wires and scaffolding, fences or screens marking out the boundaries of the site… These motley elements, not yet subsumed into the organic functions of that independent creature called a ‘building,’ give off their own light, color, and sound in this place. As such, the construction site is not quite an object, but more akin to a worldview, or a methodology. A place where a being appears as an event, or a unique epistemological stance for viewing the world. From that vantage point, that which is seen does not present itself as a being, but rather as a distribution and arrangement of microscopic events. Seeing the world from that place, one notices that what looks to be a firm and steady system is cut across with tiny holes, fissures, and the possibility of extinction. Finding the place where this can be seen—and going there to see it.

In this respect, Park’s eye is persistent, almost obstinate.

For example, in 2020 he once again explored a new kind of space—the landfill—in cities such as Incheon, Gimpo, and Busan. Construction sites and landfills create an interesting contrast as they mirror each other. If a construction site is a process of something being built, the temporality of the landfill is constituted by the process of a discarded object losing its form and outline, finally to be destroyed. On the one hand, construction and assembly; on the other, decomposition and disappearance.

Wasted Land, Archive holds fragments of the artist’s perspective as his eye roves over the landfills where trash and waste from the city is gathered and processed, and the areas that surround it. The scenery on the way to the landfill, bleak sheared mountains, automobile roads, tanks for handling the gas emitted from the waste, ponds, additional facilities, mounds of trash left here and there, a mountain of waste at sunrise, a mountain of waste in nighttime, machines that sort and shred plastic waste, the enormous pile of cut-up plastic processed by that machine, the workers at the recycling center. In all of these images, one special object is highlighted, tugging at the sleeves of our thought and attention. That object is waste.

What, then, is waste?

5.7 million tons of carpet, 8.62 million tons of styrofoam, 35 billion plastic bottles, 40 billion pieces of plastic cutlery, 4.5 million tons of office paper, enough steel to pull down and rebuild the whole of Manhattan, enough wood to heat 50 million homes for 20 years, and enough plastic wrap to cover the whole state of Texas—this, according to Edward Humes, is the total waste produced by Americans in a single year. Each American produces 102 tons of waste during his or her lifetime.³

The landfill scenes in the artist’s photographs constitute a part of this waste-phenomenon, in which our generation globally creates massive amounts of waste. In the preface to Wasted Land, Archive, Park shares the thoughts on waste that motivated his work. “We bury waste in the earth just as we would bury a dead life-form. The earth takes the life in. And the earth gives life forth again. This is the sacred nature of the earth. We do not cease these acts of burial, in the belief that the earth will destroy and then give back. But waste will not disappear. It may become powder, liquid, gas, but it stays. The form may change, but waste remains, forever” (Preface).

The horror that the artist has grasped about waste is that it overpowers the earth. Here, the earth refers to the soil-covered surface of our planet. Developed on Earth just around 500 million years ago, soil is formed over long periods of time from eroded rock mixed with the organic remains of plants. On stars without life-forms, there may be rock crumbs and dust layers, but nothing like soil—the material embracing 30% of the surface and incessantly playing out a drama of creation and disintegration.⁴ The earth, then, is the locus for the sacred character of the soil, which is alive in itself and exercises a disintegrating power, devouring and destroying everything, sprouting new life yet again from that same place. Waste, however, extends its being beyond this disintegrating power of the earth. In other words, it does not rot. Waste is not simple filth. Rather, it is a total chaos of powerful non-human agents that will endlessly cycle through and interact, without disappearing. A poignant description of this paradoxical vitality of waste, its fearsome aliveness and force, has been quoted in Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter:

“… the garbage hills are alive. In some completely peopleless areas of the swamp, there are billions of
microscopic organisms thriving underground in dark, oxygen-free communities. […] One afternoon I drove back through a field of abandoned cars and walked along the edge of a garbage hill, a forty-foot drumlin of compacted trash that owed its topography to the waste of the city of Newark. […] There had been rain the night before, so it wasn’t long before I found a little leachate seep, a black ooze trickling down the slope of the hill, an espresso of refuse. In a few hours, this stream would find its way down into the already spoiled groundwater of the Meadowlands; it would mingle with toxic streams. […] But in this moment, here at its birth, at a stream’s source in the modern meadows, this little seep was pure pollution, a pristine stew of oil and grease, of cyanide and arsenic, of cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, nickel, silver, mercury, and zinc. I touched this fluid—my fingertip was a bluish caramel
color—and it was warm and fresh. A few yards away, where the stream collected into a benzene-scented pool, a mallard swam alone.”⁵

The mountain of waste photographed by Park is alive in just this way. It is not a being, but an event. We may shred waste, bury it, build artificial gardens and lakes on top of it in order to forget and deny that which we have buried, but waste still lives on and moves, emitting gas, chemically reacting, transforming, and seeping out as leachate. Waste is materialism. It is vitalism. It will last for ages, wandering until it meets the world of organisms, and will enter once again into that world, into living bodies.

Have you seen the carcasses of the albatross photographed by Chris Jordan? Dead, with disintegrating flesh, a mass of bone and feathers, with countless plastic shards and pieces of human trash where their guts should have been.⁶

Faced with the stalwart materiality of the pieces of plastic that trickle into a life-form and endure long after that life has ended, we are urged to rethink the meaning of death in the twenty-first century. That is, the Thanatos of our age does not wear the face of a bleak and merciless death-god looking to slice off living heads with a scythe. The death drive of the twenty-first century is none other than the very vitality of microscopic beings, like plastic, that seep into cells and blood and hormones and bodily fluids and exercise minute influences, creating tumors in bodies, activating cancer cells. These beings cycle through the world in the form of waste. They wander across earth, sea, air, and streams. Landfills exist all around. Landfills are where Thanatos does its work. They are where death throbs with life, with vigor. The guts of the albatross had become microscopic landfills. Our bodies, too, are potential sites for microscopic landfills. The flesh of living things is pocked with holes, and those holes will allow the molecular absorption and accumulation of the physical and chemical affects released by waste.

Standing atop the grave-like landfill and looking out upon the city, the artist muses: This grave will continue expanding, until one day, it reaches out to touch that far-off city. Park’s photographs are like a visual hammer that forcefully dismantles the fictional wall separating landfill and city. Gazing upon his landfill photographs, we should not be urged to go explore the landfills that appear within them. Rather, we must develop an eye for seeing landfills in every place. We must master the power of perceiving the ubiquity of landfills. When we see photographs of construction sites, we do not trot out to each city to see those sites for ourselves. Instead, what we must do is this: whenever we view a perfect building, an immobile being, we must intuit the fact that it is none other than a construction site—that it is in the process of being broken, being wrecked. Being is event. The expansion of an eye that can see the event in the being—is this not the crucial desire of Sinyong Park’s aesthetics?

Having left behind the construction sites of Berlin, Daebu-do, and waste landfills, what will the artist’s eye now rest upon? One cannot help but wait in curious anticipation of what other places he will go on to explore.