Trash Photos questions the common practice of judging a photo’s value based on the message it carries or the beauty of the subject it features. As a method of this questioning, the series brings trash—a subject typically perceived as contrary to the notion of “beautiful” and “meaningful”—to the forefront, inviting viewers to reconsider these ingrained notions.

In these photos, put into the frame is trash that does not have any value or clear meaning. When encountering the scene filled with random trash without any surrounding context, the viewer would question if this can be considered good photography since there are no other internal context clues, nor is there a significant emphasis on a certain object from which a larger narrative can be inferred. They might get confused as to why the artist took these “bad” photos.

On the other hand, these works induce the viewers to question their own notion of beauty. Decreased contrast, muted palette, and the unique compositions that different trash makes inside of the frame all serve to alleviate the explicitness of trash itself. Nevertheless, this attempt of refinement fails for two reasons: firstly, these are candid photos without any setup, which makes it impossible to realize the intended composition of the artist to make it look beautiful. More importantly, even though it might have been successful in concealing that the subjects are dirty and foul-smelling, people can still recognize that it is trash in the end. The associated notion of trash is hard to shake off and makes it difficult to be regarded as a beautiful subject.

However, ironically, this failure underscores the series’ core idea. The artworks explore the boundaries between “good and beautiful” and “bad and ugly”, disclosing the arbitrary nature of this dichotomy. The trash in the photos are taken in demolished houses of areas undergoing gentrification and trash lots inside residential areas. What was cherished yesterday becomes abandoned today; a beautiful whole eventually breaks into ugly pieces. Some might say this work is total trash, but I wouldn’t mind it much. Trash does exist, and that’s what matters to me.