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keyupang.work@gmail.com
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Projects
①
2026
②
2025
③
2024
④
2025
Installation
2024
In collaboration with Chi Hao Chang
What lights up our nights?
I have always been fascinated not just by light, but by artificial light—by the ways humans create illumination, and how those lights, in turn, shape our lives. Streetlights, televisions, computer screens, smartphones, movie projectors, home lamps—these are the lights that fill our nights, that stretch our days, that dissolve the boundary between work and home, public and private, action and rest. We invented light to keep the dark away, to feel safe, to stay connected. Somewhere along the way, artificial light became something we can no longer easily turn off. Illumination Now asks: what exactly is lighting up our nights today? In a world where artificial light never goes out, the question is no longer just how we illuminate the night, but whether we can still find a place within it to linger.
The right to darkness
Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep explores some of the most destructive consequences of a world that never stops. He argues that the nonstop demands of twenty-first-century capitalism erode the separation between consumerism and control, between waking and sleeping life. In this regime, sleep becomes more than a biological need—it becomes an act of resistance, a way to reclaim what capitalism struggles to fully capture: personal time, rest, and above all, darkness.
Where hunger, sexual desire, and even friendship have been commodified, sleep and darkness remain stubborn frontiers. Crary recounts the late 1990s proposal by a Russian-European space consortium to launch satellites that would reflect sunlight back onto Earth. The plan’s original goal was to support industrial and resource extraction in the Arctic; later, its ambitions grew to include illuminating entire metropolitan areas. Scientists warned of the devastating physiological effects: the collapse of circadian rhythms, the disruption of metabolic cycles, the erosion of sleep. But cultural critics and activists went deeper, framing the night sky itself as a commons—a shared human right, a space of darkness no corporation had the authority to erase.
To have the night, to inhabit darkness, is to insist on limits. It is to claim a right to privacy. At its core, the right to darkness challenges the fantasy of uninterrupted productivity. It marks the body as finite.
Cover page of NASA Technical Paper Illumination From Space With Orbiting Solar-Reflector Spacecraft (1982), a study exploring the feasibility of using orbital mirrors to light Earth.
Artist’s rendering of a solar-reflector satellite in orbit— an early vision of space-borne illumination, decades before Russia’s 1993 Znamya-2 experiment, which briefly reflected sunlight onto Earth before failing.
Projected illumination coverage of proposed satellite reflectors over the eastern United States and northern Europe, part of early space-based concepts to extend artificial daylight across vast territories.
Capitalism Found Another Way to Light our nights
Though the satellites never made it into orbit, the night has already been transformed by subtler forces. Our devices cast their glow into bedrooms and living rooms, stretching the day far beyond its natural limits. Push notifications punctuate the dark; glowing screens follow us from work to bed, from public space to the most private corners of our lives.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in Disenchanted Night, showed how nineteenth-century street lighting was celebrated for expanding economic life and reducing the dangers of night. Today, illumination no longer descends from above; it rises from below, from the palm of the hand, from the interfaces that demand our constant attention. Recent studies show an alarming rise in people waking up at night to check messages, scroll feeds, or respond to notifications. Even our machines no longer fully rest, designed to operate around the clock and keep us perpetually reachable. But the true absurdity is this: it is precisely because there are too many messages, too many alerts, too many fragments of connection, that we must now activate sleep mode—not to help our devices rest, but to help ourselves escape them.
Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, warned that without privacy, without the capacity to withdraw from “the implacable bright light of the constant presence of others,” we cannot cultivate the singularity of the self. Today, that withdrawal is harder to access. The glow of the screen has blurred the line between public and private, work and rest, presence and absence. We escaped the satellites in the sky, but we now carry their logic in our pockets.
A group of people viewing electric street lights on the Thames Embankment, London
January 4, 1879
From The Graphic
This moment marks the arrival of artificial light into public space, celebrated as a symbol of progress and safety. But beneath the glow was a deeper shift—the expansion of control over time, the extension of activity into hours once reserved for rest.
The public promise of light has turned inward, slipping into bedrooms and private spaces. Here, illumination is no longer about shared safety or progress, but about continuous presence, continuous availability.
Making the lights
I began with a physical foundation—metal poles that echo streetlights. For the light bodies, I sculpted foam prototypes into familiar icons of contemporary life: message bubbles, notifications, voice memos. To let the forms glow from within, I vacuum-formed clear plastic over the prototypes, then installed bulbs inside—greens for messages, reds for alerts, blues for voice notes.
I chose a human-scale height instead of traditional streetlights. The point was simple: today’s illumination isn’t distant or above us—it’s intimate, something we carry and live with. Finally, I frosted the plastic to diffuse the light, leaving only the icon shapes fully transparent. From afar, they read as ordinary streetlights; up close, the digital symbols reveal themselves—mirroring how technology blends into daily life, only becoming visible when you look closer.
Foam shaped into app icons
Vacuum forming process with transparent plastic to produce the final light covers.
Masking off selected areas with vinyl before spraying the frosted finish, leaving the icon shapes clear for sharper light transmission.
Pause as basic human rights
We live in a world where light, activity, and connection seep into every corner of daily life. The night, once a space of rest, privacy, and invisibility, has been stretched, illuminated, and commodified. We are awake not just because we choose to be, but because the world around us avoids us from sleeping.
This project is not an attempt to escape technology, nor to return to some imagined past before electric light. Instead, it is a gesture toward the awarness of pausing: a small interruption, a space to reflect on the forces that shape our days and nights.
By reimagining the streetlight as a hybrid object, part historical artifact, part digital interface, I want to surface the quiet tension between past and
present, between public infrastructure and private experience. I want to ask what it means to own light, and what it means to lose darkness.
These are symbols that usually light up our personal spaces at night. Seeing these digital elements materialized in physical space creates a quiet tension, prompting reflection on how they shape our sense of connection and presence with technology.
A friend helped me to install the lights.
Pause as basic human rights
We live in a world where light, activity, and connection seep into every corner of daily life. The night, once a space of rest, privacy, and invisibility, has been stretched, illuminated, and commodified. We are awake not just because we choose to be, but because the world around us avoids us from sleeping.
This project is not an attempt to escape technology, nor to return to some imagined past before electric light. Instead, it is a gesture toward the awarness of pausing: a small interruption, a space to reflect on the forces that shape our days and nights.
By reimagining the streetlight as a hybrid object—part historical artifact, part digital interface—I want to surface the quiet tension between past and present, between public infrastructure and private experience. I want to ask what it means to own light, and what it means to lose darkness.