Offering a preview of his exhibition for the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, which includes a participatory video game about our future, curator and academic Kyong Park described how consumerism has contributed to the current environmental crisis. He took aim at society’s constant desire for material objects and need to acquire the next new thing—even if we think it’s better for the planet—and pronounced that we will need to rethink this approach entirely in order to save our world. 

“We are told to recycle and reduce pollution and so on, but few are brave enough to stand up against the ‘freedom’ of consumer choices—our most popular form of democracy. We want to convert our cars into electric, but we are unwilling to make them smaller or buy less. It's patriotic to buy and buy, and waste and waste. After all, we're not citizens anymore, just tracked consumers to further income inequality.”

Park suggested that we are at a critical juncture to change our behaviors, and through improving our attitudes towards consumption for the environment’s sake, we will also hopefully improve as a society at the same time. After all, “the crisis is not the environment, it's us…” he concluded.