Building a Sustainable Christmas Tree: An Adventure to Osaka

Seeking to infuse sustainability with festive cheer, we recently embarked on a mission to craft a Christmas tree like no other. The challenge: make an artwork from sustainable materials, sourced ethically and assembled with care on a short timeline. This story takes you behind the scenes, from the late-night scribbles and bamboo harvesting to a bunk bed on a slow boat and a star fashioned from scrap wire. Join us as we attempt to bring a sustainable creation to life and consider how materials and meaning meet along the way.

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A month ago I got an email from Aloft Osaka Dojima, a hotel in the Marriott group. They wanted a sustainable Christmas tree installed in their lobby, and had come to know about our work in Osaka. We are based in Daejeon, Korea these days, but still have occasion to visit and work with friends in Japan, so without too much deliberation, I simply told them "we can do it."

That night, I scribbled down an idea for a tree installation which would use only basic, renewable materials, and shared it with our friend Takuma who lives in Osaka. It looked good on paper, but we were both not sure a) if we could source all sustainable materials in time, and b) even if we did, would it actually work in real life once we put it together?

Nevertheless, a week later I was in a bunk bed on an overnight shipping vessel from Busan to Osaka (the cheapest and slowest travel option). With me in the bunk was a bundle of cotton rope, a tube full of Hanji — perhaps one of the most sustainable and longest-lasting papers known to humans — and pages of scribbles and math.¹ Meanwhile Takuma was harvesting bamboo from his university campus as I moved slowly along the sea, and all of this in theory was supposed to equate to a sustainable Christmas tree for a hotel lobby in the center of Osaka. We were both crossing our fingers a bit.

Visiting our friendly local Hanji dealer 파고다한지상사 in Daejeon, Korea before I left for Osaka. He is super kind and has such a huge library of hanji that I often spend way too long here!

After getting off the boat in Osaka, I headed for an artist space called Super Studio Kitakagaya. This place is a giant old warehouse in a shipbuilding yard filled with artists doing all sorts of crazy, amazing, and large-scale work. Luckily they had a small space availale, and a bed for me to crash in on short notice. Yes, I am well over 40 and still crashing in dockyard warehouses for the sake of art — and I love it, on occasion.

We spent a few days in this studio space, figuring out how the tree structure would come together. Then came the final problem. All of this had to be disassembled and then re-installed in a very short span of time, between 7am - noon at the hotel, the next day.

We practiced putting it all together that night, kind of like a 'time trial'. It all looked fine in the warehouse. But at the end of the night, we were missing one important piece. A tree like this needs something on top, and we had nothing. No material. No good ideas. We were so totally gassed from figuring out the tree itself, we had no energy left for considering the top.

Then Suhee sent a message. She had an idea to bend scrap wire into a star that would kind of stick out from the top like a cartoon character's antenna. I think she might have been inspired by the Daejeon city mascot named Kumdori…

The last thing I did before trying to get some sleep the night before the install was to bend wire around a small piece of bamboo, mocking up that star. To my sleepy eyes, Kumdori might have approved.

On install day, we worked slightly slower than anticipated, finishing at 2pm. We also ended up needing a glue stick, so one tick off our sustainability scorecard. Not too bad. It all went up in the end, and it looks miraculously close to the spirit of the original drawing, a rather cute, somewhat subtle yet decidedly festive thing to encounter when entering the hotel.

It also happens to be perched in an old three wheel truck that the hotel decided to park in the lobby. Boy, what a tiny, cute truck.

And that wee little Kumdori-inspired star on top? Takuma’s hands covered it with hanji paper, and it bobs and sways with the breeze. Suhee also shared with me later, the special meaning of that star. According to the legend, Kumdori is a somewhat mischievous and naive space fairy baby. His counterbalance to this, is the star atop his head, which as any good star should, allows him to connect the the wisdom of the universe, thus helping all those wild ideas become more harmonious. How about that? A nod to our hometown, to the heavens, and maybe just what the tree needed.

After it was all over, I caught the same boat back to Korea and slept for a few days. I did not really have time to process what we did while we were doing it, but looking at the images and video and this very writing, I think about how cool it is to have a job where we are allowed to transform scribbles and ideas into real things for people to appreciate. Also, these days, of how artists often push each other to think more deeply, not only about the meaning of our work, but the materiality of what we build, and how that meaning and materiality can integrate with our culture and this environment in a mutually-beneficial way.

At least, that's the secret sauce we are after.

The incomplete base of the tree. Look at those nasty Boy Scout lashings!

Basically, all of the primary materials were sustainably sourced, and all of them will be re-used directly by the hotel and by us afterwards, for other projects. Nothing goes to the trash can. While no act or thing is really truly sustainable in the sense we often think it is, this one seems to have come pretty close to being … harmonious?

In the closing statement that explains this piece at the hotel, I wrote that “I hope the subtle and illuminating beauty of the materials and how they came together helps inspire us to consider new ways of thinking and living together with this earth.”

That is, indeed, what I always hope.

Thanks, friends, and thanks to Moses at Aloft Osaka Dojima and Marriott for supporting this kind of thing to happen, and to Aoi and Chishima Foundation For Creative Osaka [ おおさか創造千島財団 ] for always being there to support creative things to happen in Osaka.

1. Yes, artists use math! Do mathematicians use art? Of course they do.