Faculty of Art

Drawing and Painting

Hyeweon Park

The Most Ordinary Chopsticks

This work explores the existence of ordinary people — those who pass through life unrecorded — through disposable chopsticks, objects that are easily consumed and discarded. The chopsticks used in this piece were collected directly from regular customers at the Japanese restaurant where I have worked for eight years. These are people who will never be documented by any particular event or remembered by history, yet I have spent years observing their tastes, habits, and personalities up close.Though the chopsticks appear identical at first glance, traces of food, variations in color, and patterns of use reveal the marks of distinct individuals. I understand these subtle differences not as mere contamination, but as records left behind by different lives.In the work, each pair of chopsticks is given a name and a brief backstory, reconstructing them as individual characters. Arranged in repetition, they form a sense of collectivity — while each chopstick simultaneously becomes an independent presence and the subject of its own story. Rather than facing anonymous objects, the viewer encounters the traces of separate people.The work raises a question about how the people we easily overlook, and the lives they live, disappear without being remembered. At the same time, through the act of naming and giving narrative, it opens up the possibility that they might exist — even briefly — as someone's main character.