Plastic Wood is a continuing project exploring culture, adaptation, industrialisation and form. In Korea, it is quite often to see the visual appearance of wood. More often than not, that visual expression of wood is just that, a visual expression and not the actual material itself. This has fostered an environment where the visual expression of wood is often used more than wood itself. This is a consequence of industrial efficiency, time and cost and can be seen almost everywhere. As the use of these visual expressions of wood have increased, we now see many plastic incarnations of these where wood is often moved, sculpted and shaped in ways that normal wood could not previously achieve. I call this phenomenon Plastic Wood and its something that I find charming, distinctly Korean and something that reminds me of home. This is a series exploring the concept of Plastic Wood and all of the various and impossible wood forms that are possible within this context.
Plastic wood in use on the streets of Seoul.