Designer Yoon Ho Seop poses for a photo at the Museum Dulle Gil Gallery exhibition at Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) in Seoul on Wednesday afternoon. By Shin So Young viator@hani.co.kr

More than 100 life-size southern bottlenose dolphins, an endangered species, fill the walls of the Perimeter Gallery on the third floor of the Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) Museum in Seoul's Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, where I visited on May 12. The paintings, by Yoon Hoseop, 81, known as Green Designer, have been in the gallery for nearly two months since the exhibition began on May 13.

On a shelf are 10 bowling balls and pins filled with clean soil, which the artist has been making since 2000 out of bundles of parcel packaging tape and other materials. One When a foreign visitor tried to throw the bowling ball, he saw the explanation, “A bowling game that destroys the land for the next generation with the garbage I made,” and quietly put it down.

The exhibition, on view through Sept. 29, is called “greencanvas in DDP,” the name of the artist's studio at the foot of Bukhansan Mountain. The exhibition aims to tell the story of the green canvas, which is a vivid trace of the designer's life and art.

“I was handed a cell phone by a foreign woman who came to the exhibition and the translator app said, ‘I'm holding back my tears,’ in Korean, which is what you'd expect from an old man who's dying. After that, I come out a little early to meet the audience.”

'greencanvas in ddp' poster

A painting of a southern bottlenose dolphin by artist Yoon Ho Seop fills the walls of the Dulleungil Gallery. Kang Sung Man Senior Reporter

I first asked Noh, who constantly interacts with visitors with his gentle smile, what the concept of the exhibition was. “Coexistence,” he replied, pointing to his entry, “Where are you going so fast? “It's about living together. Look around us, everyone is running for first place, Seoul National University, Harvard, gold medals. Let's not be like that, there are so many real things around us besides that.”

He believes design is largely responsible for environmental degradation. It plays a key role in the cycle of “mass production, mass consumption, and mass destruction,” he says. This is why he organized Korea's first green design exhibition, “Everyday Earth Day,” in 2000, and has been organizing “Good People Who Care About the Environment” and “Green Summer” exhibitions every year since 2008. In 1995, when he was dean of Kookmin University's School of Architecture, he opened a required liberal arts course on “Environment and Design,” and in 2003, he opened Korea's first green design major in graduate school.

He retired from the university in 2008 and is also known as the 'Insadong T-shirt Grandpa'. From 2002 until 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic, he spent six Sundays a year (April through September) in Seoul's Insadong neighborhood, painting environmental messages on old T-shirts with natural materials. “The children I painted for are coming to this exhibition as adults, and I must have painted 10,000 T-shirts over the years.”

Yoon describes his work since he first encountered “the environment” in 1991 as “planting green DNA in people. “T-shirts are worn for at least a year or two,” he says, “so I'm sure the people who receive them from me will be reminded of the message I'm trying to convey every time they wear them, and the green DNA will have gotten into them, which is what I'm hoping for with this exhibition.”

Also on display is a painting of a family of boars by an Israeli female veteran. “The other day, a 20-something Israeli woman came to the exhibition and showed me her sketchbook, saying that she's been traveling around the world painting since she got out of the army, and the drawing of the boar mother taking care of her cubs is so peaceful that we got it and are displaying it.”

The exhibition is also a companion piece to Green Summer, which celebrated its 15th anniversary last year, he said. Shocked by the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, he opened his SNS account to spread environmental messages more actively, and has used it as a conduit for submitting artwork before Green Summer.

Artist Yoon Ho Seop points to a piece in his current exhibition, which was made from waste from his exhibition last year. Kang Sung Man Senior Writer

Artist Hoseop Yoon paints a dolphin on vinyl in the exhibition space. Courtesy of DDP Museum

He's life changed dramatically at the 1991 Goseong World Jamboree, where he created a poster for the event. A Japanese university student visiting the poetry contest asked Yoon about the state of environmental volunteerism in Korea. This was a major concern for the student, who was majoring in accounting and was involved in an environmental club. To answer the question, the writer contacted environmental organizations and naturally embraced the value of the environment. Masayoshi Miyashita, then a third-year student at Hosei University, is now an acupuncturist who changed his life. “He naturally treats human suffering, and he came to see this exhibition.”

Crab children have always been special to me, and I've been calling them up and talking to them affectionately. He calls them up in the market, talks to them affectionately, and gives them gifts like erasers and pencils. “ “They are our future, and without the future, there is no present and no past,” he says, adding that one child's memory from the Insadong performance sticks out in his mind." “He came with his horse, and he looked at me from a distance, and he came up to me and asked me to draw a nuclear power plant burning on his clothes, so I put newspaper inside his clothes and drew it for him. When I saw him, I thought, ‘You can't let go of hope, because it's a seed of hope.’”

It's been 24 years since you held your first green design exhibition. When asked how people's perception of the environment has changed in the intervening years, he says: “ Everyone talks about the environment, and there's not a company that doesn't talk about being green, but I don't think they really have a green DNA in them. They approach it (environmental issues) intellectually, reactively. Pat They think they know it all, and when I talk about it, their heads turn."

Yoon Ho Seop Designer. Reporter Shin So Young 

So what are the artist's thoughts on the future of the planet? Optimistic or pessimistic? “I don't have an answer, I'm pessimistic, but I can't say I'm pessimistic, because that's like asking me to give up on life. I think I have to do what I have to do, whether there is a future or not.”

For him, the biggest role and responsibility of design today is to minimize environmental degradation. When asked about the challenge for younger designers, he says, “When they come and see my exhibition, they will feel something,” referring to Austrian designer Viktor Papanek (1927-98). “He was a famous designer for the environment. When he took on a project, he always asked what it meant to the world and what impact it had. He designed for humans.”

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