01: Ash Archive 2024

This project explores the relationship between consumerism and individual behavior by collecting and recontextualizing discarded cigarette butts, transforming mundane waste into symbolic objects. Often dismissed as trivial trash, cigarette butts bear traces of personal consumption while reflecting industrial production, global trade, and environmental pollution. Over 400 collected butts were photographed, their images printed on circular cards and systematically arranged in ashtrays using a typological approach. Through this organized presentation, individual acts dissolve into patterns of repetition and quantity, exposing how consumerism engulfs personal agency

The arrangement highlights subtle differences in brands, burn marks, and usage patterns, amplifying the tension between mass production and personal habits. By employing repetition, spatial intervention, and classification, the project challenges perceptions of waste, turning cigarette butts into a visual archive. These objects not only document personal choices but also reveal how capitalist logic shapes daily behavior.

When discarded fragments are neatly ordered, contradictions emerge—between waste and order, individuality and systems, privacy and publicness. The work invites viewers to reconsider the social implications of consumption and recognize how overlooked traces coalesce into broader cultural and historical narratives.

RUIZHI LIU

©2025 R.LiU