Dylan Hong
Yongsan International School of Seoul
Abstract
Environmental art does more than depict nature or substitute recycled materials for conventional media. It creates ways of perceiving ecological systems, confronting environmental damage, and reconsidering human responsibility. This paper examines six artists—Robert Smithson, Andy Goldsworthy, Olafur Eliasson, Joseph Beuys, Tiffany Chung, and Bordalo II—whose practices represent distinct but overlapping approaches to art and sustainability. Smithson’s earthworks reveal entropy, extraction, and the contradictions of transforming land in order to examine it. Goldsworthy’s ephemeral arrangements treat weather, decay, and seasonal change as collaborators, proposing attentiveness and impermanence as alternatives to ownership and control. Eliasson converts climate processes into embodied public experiences, making atmosphere and glacial loss physically immediate. Beuys expands ecological art into social sculpture through collective tree planting and civic participation. Chung uses cartography, archives, and speculative models to connect climate vulnerability with displacement, planning, war, and political power. Bordalo II transforms discarded consumer materials into monumental animals, exposing the relationship between waste and habitat destruction. Together, these artists demonstrate that environmental art can function as witness, critique, experiment, memorial, and intervention. Although art cannot replace environmental policy or scientific action, it can make complex ecological relationships visible, felt, and ethically urgent, thereby contributing to the cultural changes required for more sustainable forms of life.
