Faculty of Art

Sculpture/Installation

Ashia Jeon

K-ampbell's Soup Cans

Good soup?

“There is an ongoing connection to South Korea’s recent history and my experience navigating identity within it. This work examines the country’s rapid transformation from poverty to a global economic power, as well as the commodification of its culture in global markets. Although many of these shifts occurred before I was born, Korea remained largely unrecognized in the West during my childhood in Canada. I often experienced my Korean identity as something unknown and invisible, leading me to instinctively assimilate and suppress it. As I entered adolescence, Korea’s global image shifted. It became consumable and culturally desirable. This sudden fascination altered how I considered others' perceptions of me, placed between past invisibility and present hyper-visibility. My project reflects this tension through a display of Campbell’s soup cans, with one secretly filled with kimchi. While the cans appear identical and mass-produced, a projected video of me making kimchi for the first time introduces a living, fermenting process that contrasts static commodities. This parallels South Korea’s trajectory from a once-overlooked culture to a widely circulated, but reduced marketable form. Referencing Warhol, the work examines how cultural identity can be standardized and packaged for consumption within global production systems.”