Your car is your culture

For 30 years Kim Young-gyui spent nearly 16 hours a day in a car. The 66-year-old taxi driver rode about 750,000 kilometres in all, more than twice the distance an average car travels in its lifetime. Recently he retired, though, and had to bid farewell to his car. It was about to send it to a junkyard. 

As luck would have it, he got a chance to keep his faithful companion with Hyundai Motor’s campaign “Brilliant Memories” that transforms used cars into objects that owners can keep for the rest of their lives.

Kim’s sedan was converted by an artist known only as Khan. The passenger seat is now Kim’s private couch, complete with a holder for his coffee cup. His portrait is engraved on the polished exterior surface with LED lighting. 

The couch is on display with other cars-turned-artworks at the exhibition by Hyundai Motor at Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul.

Last year Hyundai collected stories from drivers of its cars who planned to sell or scrap them. The idea was to highlight the emotional aspects of driving. The firm selected stories that describe cars as life partners and friends and had artists turn the vehicles into artworks and objects the owners can keep as mementoes. 

Fourteen artists participated. Their work will be included in the Hyundai art collection. Objects such as a couch, luggage carrier and audio system will be given to the car owners.

Renowned artist Lee Yong-baek, who worked on the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011, created two pieces from a Porter pickup truck belonging to a deliveryman. The driver spent most of his days in the truck, delivering items, eating his meals and listening to music on breaks. 

Lee made a cast sculpture of the truck, broke it into parts and reassembled them into a new sculpture. In tribute to the deliveryman’s hard work, Lee made an audio set decorated with the floral-print image of his work “Angel Soldier” and equipped it with a better sound system. 

 “I wanted to give the delivery man and his wife an audio system after I heard their story of listening to music on the truck audio system and planning their life together,” Lee said at the exhibition opening last month. 

Another Porter pickup inspired Kim Jong-ku to conduct a live performance, using powder ground from the car parts to write out the story of the owner, a farmer whose whole life was spent raising yellow melons and selling them across the country. 

Yang Soo-in created a car swing using a mid-size Sonata II sedan that belonged to an office worker-turned-filmmaker. Viewers can climb on for a swing. Once the car door is closed, a recorded voice asks random questions about their own lives. The artist said he intended to give the owner an inspiration for his future movie work.