Items: Individual Instrumentalization

About The Entry

“Items” is a design-based art project that begins with ordinary household bills, reinterpreted to reveal how individuals often function like “tools,” driven more by obligations than by personal agency. By collecting one month of real expenditure data from participants through interviews and documentation, I transformed bills into symbolic visual forms and installations, exposing the repetitive structures of daily life.

From nine representative bills, I identified recurring patterns: the majority of income was devoted to essential living costs, family duties, and work-related expenses. These records suggested that many lives follow pre-set programs, leaving little space for autonomy. The bills thus serve as silent evidence of pressure, repetition, and the compression of individual choice.

To translate these insights into art, personal details were anonymized, leaving only expenditure categories and proportions. Each category was recalculated into percentages and converted into graphical surface divisions. Through this process, every bill became a unique emblem, reflecting its owner’s lived condition. Repetition, a key strategy of contemporary art, was employed by multiplying the bill format across posters, books, and installations, turning the bill itself into a symbol of collective experience.

Presented in a curatorial context, Accounts resists the neutrality of the white cube exhibition model and creates a spatial narrative that merges data, design, and storytelling. The installation’s curving forms suggest both the human brain and the endless cycle of financial accounting—read simultaneously as distorted portraits of “tool-like humans” or as delicate flower-like shapes.

The project ultimately invites reflection: if life becomes only about earning money and fulfilling tasks, does our humanity fade? By reframing the bill as both document and artwork, Accounts encourages viewers to pause, reconsider the balance between duty and individuality, and rediscover warmth and autonomy within the routines of modern existence.