The surface of plastic,
the truth beneath it

Plastic is the material of contemporary life not because it is beautiful or durable but because it is infinitely adaptable — it can imitate almost any other substance, wrap any shape, be coloured to match any desire. It is the material of substitution, of the copy, of the surface that presents itself as something it is not. In this sense, plastic is already a kind of argument about the contemporary: a world in which surface is sovereign, and in which the gap between appearance and reality is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be managed.

Min JeongSee's engagement with plastic as both material and metaphor begins from this recognition. Her practice does not simply use plastic; it thinks through it. From the early Plastic Beauty and Plastic Society series, through to the later work on transparency, light, and representation, the recurring question is: what does a surface hide, and what does it reveal about what it hides? The answer is never simple — plastic can be transparent as well as opaque, fragile as well as persistent, honest as well as deceptive.

This complexity is what makes plastic a rich critical medium rather than a polemical one. The work does not condemn the surface; it attends to it — pressing on the material until it yields what it has been holding.

The word "disguise" (위장) that runs through discussions of Min JeongSee's work is not accidental. Contemporary society is characterized, above all, by the sophistication of its surfaces: the packaging of consumer goods, the graphic design of institutions, the curated faces presented on social media, the smooth exteriors of buildings and bureaucracies that conceal what happens within. Plastic — translucent, moldable, ubiquitous — is the material correlate of this condition.

Min JeongSee's practice works by holding the surface still long enough to see through it. Printmaking is a medium built on the idea of the transferred image — the press that moves an image from one surface to another, the matrix that underlies the print. In her hands, this structural feature of the medium becomes a critical tool: the print reveals the underside, the plate beneath the page, the pressure required to produce what appears effortless on the surface.

The Plastic Society series staged this most directly: placing plastic surfaces as social fact, asking what it would mean to live within a world of such surfaces. Plastic Promise pressed further — what is promised by a surface, and what is delivered? More recent work on light and representation extends the question into the realm of image-making itself: how does an image form on a surface, and what does it leave when it is gone?

Min JeongSee's formation at Hongik University and SAIC gave her access to two distinct traditions. At Hongik, one of Korea's leading printmaking programs, she absorbed the technical rigour and material discipline of Korean printmaking practice. At SAIC's Printmedia department — a program defined by its expansion of printmaking beyond conventional boundaries into installation, video, books, and performance — she encountered the conceptual breadth that would define her subsequent practice.

The artist book, a form she has pursued throughout her career and which has entered institutional collections including the Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection and Hyundai Children's Book Art Museum, is a particularly apt vehicle for her inquiry. A book is itself a surface technology — a device for sequencing images and texts, for presenting content through layers. In Min JeongSee's artist books, this structure becomes a way of building up and peeling back, of constructing a surface only to reveal what is beneath.

Residencies at Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium — one of the world's foremost centres for printmaking and the graphic arts — and at MMCA Goyang Studio, 대구예술발전소, and 청주미술창작스튜디오 have embedded her practice in both the international printmaking community and the Korean contemporary art field. The range of these placements — from Belgium to Chicago to Seoul — reflects a practice that has always understood printmaking as a mobile, transferable discipline: one whose logic of impression and transfer applies wherever a surface exists.