City of Gaia

Re-tracing Buro

〈Green Machine〉, 2023.

Light box, digital print, single channel video, sticker, dimensions variable.
Commissioned by the Asia Culture Center. Courtesy of the artist.

Trees serve as key elements in the ecological environment of urban spaces and are planted, moved, cut down, and replaced throughout the city in response to human needs, whether it be in parks, on streets, or around apartment complexes. Based on the history of painting from the pre- and post-industrial revolution eras and research on urban spaces, Green Machine analyzes the ways in which trees have been represented and how they exist in the present day.

The artist contrasts the 18th-century precursor to the Industrial Revolution with the 21st-century pursuit of post-industrialism. They explore efforts to establish new foundations for a better future, potentially including initiatives like the Green New Deal. Images of trees representing the urban landscapes of the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries appear on a light box that resembles an advertising billboard. On the other hand, images that have represented trees in the temporal between the two centuries are played as a slideshow. The wall design inspired by wallpaper with plant motifs that is often applied to daily spaces alludes to an ecosystem of trees with deformities and a grotesqueness caused by human impacts, looking like something out of science fiction. Through these images of mutated trees representing the course of human history, Green Machine addresses the fate of trees to be determined by what humans pursue, how they implement it, and what they plan to do next.