Moi

Artwork ID: BBH002
Dimensions: 20 m (W) × 2 m (D) × 5.5 m (H)
Materials: 12,887 white paper cups, hand-stacked installation
Year: 2026

Description
Seven figures stand in a line inside the gallery.

They do not speak.
They do not move.
Yet they are unmistakably watching.

Moi begins with the seven Moai of Ahu Akivi on Rapa Nui, Easter Island. The Moai were never simply monumental stone figures. They were ancestral presences, guardians of memory, and spiritual embodiments of the community’s lineage. The past was not understood as something that had disappeared. It stood within the present, watching over the living.

The artist rebuilds these ancient guardians through one of the most fragile materials of contemporary life.
12,887 white cups are stacked by hand into seven figures, each rising to a height of 5.5 meters. From a distance, they appear solemn and imposing, like ancient stone forms. But as viewers move closer, that sense of permanence begins to shift. These figures are not stone. They cannot withstand weather, time, or force. They may tremble at the slightest disturbance.

This paradox lies at the center of Moi.

Human beings have always tried to leave something behind: names, faces, ancestors, beliefs, power, memory. Even knowing that all things pass, we build monuments in order to hold what we fear losing. The Moai are among the most powerful expressions of this desire. They are stone answers to the questions: Where do we come from? Whom do we owe? What must not be forgotten?

In this work, however, the guardian is no longer made from enduring stone, but from what is easily used, released, and forgotten. The fragility of the material is not simply a physical condition. It becomes a way of asking what our own civilization chooses to remember, what it chooses to forget, and what it is leaving to the future. Earlier civilizations carved their ancestors into stone. Today, without always realizing it, we build monuments from consumption, repetition, and waste.

The number seven is central to the work.
The seven figures stand as individual presences, yet together they form a single procession. They suggest not one person, but a community; not one generation, but a lineage; not one memory, but memory passed from body to body, century to century. They resemble one another, but they are not identical. Each figure holds its own silence, its own slight imbalance, its own surface of time. Memory, too, is never preserved in a single form.

The fact that the Moai of Ahu Akivi face the ocean is especially significant. Unlike most Moai, which face inward toward the community, these seven look outward toward the horizon. They face the unknown, the distance, and the time that has not yet arrived. Moi carries this same gesture. The figures do not answer the viewer directly. They seem to look beyond us, toward a future we cannot yet see.

They ask:

What are we building now?
Is it protection, or warning?
Is it memory, or ruin?
Is what we leave behind truly what we intended as our legacy?

This work does not simply recreate an ancient civilization. It borrows the form of an old guardian in order to turn our gaze back toward the present. We still make monuments. They are no longer made only of stone, ritual, or sacred labor. Our repeated choices, our habits of use and disposal, our indifference, and our forgetting also become monuments.

The seven figures of Moi stand in silence.
Their silence belongs to the ancestors, but also to generations not yet born.

They do not accuse.
They simply watch.

And before that gaze, we are asked to face what cannot be avoided:

What are we remembering?
What are we forgetting?
And what are we leaving behind?

Artist Statement

I do not see the Moai simply as monumental stone figures.
I see them as a way memory stands.

The Moai of Easter Island carry the meanings of ancestry, community, protection, and inheritance. They do not push the past behind them. They bring the past into the present. This is what moved me most deeply. What we call the past may not be gone. It may still be looking at us.

The seven Moai of Ahu Akivi are especially important to me because they face the sea. Unlike most Moai, which face inward toward the community, these seven look toward the horizon. That direction felt powerful. It was not only a direction, but an attitude: the memory of those who came before standing before the world that has not yet arrived.

I wanted to rebuild that form with a material that belongs to the present — ordinary, light, and impermanent.
The work began from this contradiction: to build a figure associated with endurance from a material that cannot endure. Through this paradox, I wanted to ask what kind of legacy our own civilization is creating.

People in the past carved what they valued into stone.
What are we carving into the future?
What form will the things we make, use, and discard eventually take?

Stacking 12,887 cups by hand was not only a process of construction. It was a process of counting memory, counting traces, counting what remains after use. One cup, then another, then another. Through that repetition, I came to understand that monuments are not always made through grand declarations. Sometimes they are formed by small actions repeated over time.

Moi is not nostalgia for an ancient civilization.
It is a question addressed to us now.

The Moai were built to remember ancestors.
The seven figures in this work ask how the future will remember us.

They are not looking back.
They are looking toward a time that has not yet arrived.