Artists: Eugene Jung, boma pak, Jiajia Zhang, Bruno Zhu
The ubiquity of consumer goods with planned lifespans, from digital devices to fast fashion and souvenirs to construction materials, carry a dual weight: physical and emotional. We form real bonds with them, such as a plastic doll that becomes a source of profound comfort to a child or a fake gemstone ring that promises eternal love. Yet, these relationships are also part of an item’s design, encouraging repeat consumption and disposal. Through installations made with everyday materials and commodities, the artists in The Edge of Belongings reveal the instant allure and irony of affordability and disposability in capitalist fantasies, and the way that even the disposable leaves behind residues that linger. This exhibition, featuring the work of Eugene Jung, boma pak, Jiajia Zhang, and Bruno Zhu, observes the unexpected intimacies we feel with common and disposable objects and how these connections reflect broader socioeconomic structures.
Zhu uses inexpensive styling products to show how the superficial connections of contemporary life can be sources of both joy and ambivalence. Jung’s installation, inspired by her broken laptop, explores affinity and disconnection through the fragility of digital devices and platforms, framing the loss of data as individual catastrophes. pak adopts fictional corporate identities to repurpose seemingly valueless or intangible materials, like shimmery fake marble prints and faux scents, to investigate the way that capitalism entices and manipulates us. Zhang’s video and drawings blur private and public space to articulate how processes of enduring love and care, such as motherhood, can be captured within fleeting, commodified moments.
Together, these works look at what persists beyond materiality in an era marked by the mass-produced items that permeate our lives: fragments of intimate memories and meaning that last amid the continual upheavals of the high-consumption world to which we are attached.
