Yoonsik Chico Park
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아 [Ah]
immortalized-ish
Intergenerational Conversations
Gulp
Drawings & Sculpture
Debris & Erasure Series
Everything I Smoked This Year
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71 electronic cigarettes, steel wire, corrugated metal panel, nails, wooden canvas frame.
83x107x7cm.
Electronic cigarettes, or “vapes,” were first released into the market in around 2003 as a supposed healthier alternative to smoking tobacco. Since gaining greater popularity amongst the youth, particularly in North America through the wide success of the J**L products, there was an estimated 82 million vape users worldwide by 2021. Even in the UAE, smoke stores, which once mostly dealt with mostly shisha, medwakh, and cigarette related products, have seen a surge of business from adding a wide selection of vapes to the list of products they carry.
It’s been interesting to follow the evolution of vapes on the market for the last ten years, from mods to J**Ls, to refillable kits, to the currently most popular single-and-ready-to-use plastic devices that come with rechargeable batteries that are meant to be discarded once the juice in the device runs out. In addition to the to-be-confirmed long term health benefits of vapes, these newly popularized disposables have become an environmental and fire hazard because, in addition to the large amount of additional plastic heading to the landfills, the disposed batteries have been causing a large number of fires in waste and recycling facilities.
Just in the UAE, the vape market was projected to reach USD 68.5m in 2024. Just how many vapes are that? I collected dead vapes that I smoked for a year just to see how many an individual might smoke. As a result of efforts (?) of the past year, I present this slightly comical but also personally alarming assemblage of 71 vapes.
January 2025.