sTo Len stares up at the Bennington College students through black-rimmed glasses, wearing a black outfit patterned with patches, his hair spiked every which way. His moniker, a remnant of his younger punk days, fits his appearance. But his monochromatic ensemble is not about appearance, rather, functionality. He spends much of his time picking through trash and pollution, and wearing black hides the remnants of his work.

“It’s kind of beautiful,” Len admits, staring up at the projected photograph of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He chuckles. “I’m ashamed to think so.”

Sitting in the audience, I am ashamed to agree. Vivid layers of orange oil striate the ocean’s turquoise surface, dwarfing the boat floating atop. The wandering oil pollution reminded Len of his home, of his many years living alongside the post-apocalyptic disrepair of various New York City waterways. This pollution would become an important source for his work.

Len is an artist. Exploring various mediums and countries through artist residencies, he seeks out what the rest of us probably wish to ignore: waste, trash, garbage, detritus, pollution. Whatever you want to call it, Len is fascinated by it.

*****

From his youth, spent in Alexandria, Virginia, Len was inclined to walk a path opposite everyone else. He made playgrounds of the junkyard and the dump, reimagining the items people left behind into swords and other toys. Being half Vietnamese, and one of the only Asian kids in his grade, he grew up familiar with the feeling of being an outsider.

At the age of three, his favorite band was KISS; he graduated to punk rock when he turned twelve, finding solace in music that celebrated outsiderness. “Music and art were always my best friends. Art was an escape, but it was also empowering. The Washington, D.C., punk scene gave me the permission I needed to celebrate being different and to create art with a do-it-yourself ethos.”

Today, Len’s art lures the audience into experiencing the waste systems they live within, and the natural worlds that these systems damage. Len is an explorer, digging into the histories of trash and garbage collection and the people behind it all. His work ranges from remixing archived sanitation department videos to collaborating with the natural world, creating artistic prints using oil and trash to visualize human impact on bodies of water.  

The United States produces about 4.9 pounds of trash per person, per day, which is nearly 300 million tons of waste each year.

“If you really start thinking about the waste crisis, you just want to curl up into a ball, never get out of bed,” Len admits. “I understand how paralysis happens. But that doesn’t help anything or anybody.” Instead, he uses art to tempt audiences into reckoning with their own trash-making. In the process of creating, he embeds himself among places, people, and objects that may otherwise lie neglected.

So, what is so interesting about garbage?

“It’s the stuff people don’t want to think about,” he observes easily. “I love the challenge to make something beautiful with this, the least likely thing. How do we trick the audience into looking at this?”

Recycled art is no new phenomenon. Len is just one of many people worldwide who breathe new life into otherwise wasted materials, whether by necessity or with a message in mind. One of his first inspirations was James Hampton, a D.C. native who created “Throne of the Third Heaven” out of aluminum foil, plastic, cardboard, and other found materials. Hampton built his throne over a period of fourteen years, in a rented garage while working as a janitor. “He was creating art because he had to, and he was using whatever he could find to make his vision a reality,” Len remarks.

*****

The least likely place to find artistic inspiration might be the New York Department of Sanitation. Yet it is here that Len spent two years as the Public Artist in Residence.

The Public Artists in Residence (PAIR) program, hailing from the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, launched in New York City in 2015, under the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. PAIR puts artists in city government offices and tasks them with designing creative solutions to pressing issues, encouraging them to move beyond the rules of bureaucracy to create conversation and community. Len began his residency with a research phase, and, without an idea of what to create, he walked into the world’s largest sanitation department with humility.

The only appropriate word to describe the New York Department of Sanitation is “gargantuan.” With over 10,000 employees and 100 facilities, DSNY collects 12,000 tons of garbage each day.

“We’re burying ourselves,” Len says. “People have been sold this idea that convenience and disposability is easy. It is now ubiquitous with life. That convenience turns into mountains of single-use plastic.”

At first overwhelmed, he began simply, determined to ask sanitation employees about their work, their lives. Eventually he built an oral history of the department and the people within it. “Sanitation workers know so much about you,” he says. “They are seeing what sustains us, the trail that 8.5 million people of NYC leave. There are a lot of clues in that trail as to who we are as humans, good and bad.”

Len paints a slightly romantic picture of the camaraderie among the workers. At 5:30 every morning in the garage, with workers waiting to go to their trucks, the commissioner delivered a rousing speech before the workers set off to clean the streets.

“There is a familial component to the DSNY,” Len emphasizes. “Generations of families have worked for the department, quintessential New Yorkers, molded by the city. The workers of the waste world are humble people.” They are often aware of the necessity of composting and proactive about ideas regarding waste. They are the ones who see it—and lift it.

Despite different backgrounds and political ideologies, the sanitation workers and Len found common ground in their interest in trash. Many came to Len’s art shows to see his remixes of forgotten DSNY signage and documentary footage and the video game he created giving new life to the trash mascot, Phil D. Basket.

*****

Through his work, Len seeks out stories in every corner and every person. “What places need more TLC? More visibility?” He is drawn to neglected locations like urban waterways and landfills. How often do we think of these lands, mottled with our trash? Do we know where our garbage ends up, or are we satisfied with just sending it “away”?

For Len, “away is a real place, populated by real people.” A visit to one such “away” landed the artist at a residency in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, on a landfill that had only recently ceased burning after a decade. With a shopping cart found among the trash, Len perused the summits of trash piles, alongside locals who made their livelihoods sifting plastic and metal to sell.

“The landfill holds a lot of life and death in one place,” he muses. Among the heaps of garbage, Len found stray cats, horses, crows, even a litter of puppies living in a tire. He watched baby chicks hatch from eggs that had made it to the landfill intact. Yet, simultaneously, stories he heard of dead bodies, chemical waste, and self-igniting trash fires hung over him.

By searching through the complex history of Bishkek’s pollution, Len began the curation of the Trash Museum of Bishkek. With help from landfill workers and local artists, a shipping container placed atop garbage is now adorned with just that. Colorful bowling balls, dusty bottle caps, and a shattered computer live anew among other objects and photographs chronicling the history of waste in the city. Standing on heaps of garbage, while admiring it on literal pedestals, Len hopes museum-goers can clearly see why we need to make less trash.

It is easy to become lost in the encroaching hopelessness of the world of waste, but Len’s presence opposes any gloom around him. In his mind, realism and optimism coexist. “Where there is pain, one can still find joy. I think my default is to find humor and levity in sites like this. Otherwise, it is all just too depressing.” Through art and conversation, often shared with a joke and laughter, Len asks us to investigate our own waste-making habits. He knows we can change the trash we make.

*****

I meet Len at the gate of the Queens Botanical Garden (site of a former—you guessed it—landfill), his most recent artist residency. He asks if I want to go for a walk, and within minutes, volunteers greet him, one after another as we stroll through the park. He shows me his anthotype prints, artworks inked with vibrant hues of the flowers he picks daily. 

Each photograph Len prints revives a different moment in the history of the garden. He describes each person in the scenes, detailed in various colors, then points to a print of a woman framed on the wall. Her figure defined by muted greens and shadowy whites, she pushes a bin among the shoots of flowers and grasses nearby. He tells me she commutes an hour and a half both ways, every day, five days a week, to volunteer at the garden. The same respect shines in his voice when recalling the stories of the sanitation workers he met in New York and the landfill employees in Bishkek.

Len’s work concerns people—but is nothing without place. He collaborates with nature, with polluted waterways, with plants. “I talk to places. I talk to water,” he says. This collaboration led to a form of printmaking coined by Len himself, “Tsunaminagashi”: tsunami signifying a flood of something, nagashi meaning floating.

One day, while painting in his studio with sumi ink, Len spilled a few drops in his water cup. Fascinated with the way the black liquid held on the surface, he dipped some paper in the cup and watched as the ink transferred from water to paper. He believed for a moment a real invention lay on his hands.

A Google search swiftly corrected him. Suminagashi, a traditional printmaking technique dating back to the twelfth century, was practiced by Shinto monks in Japan. In the animistic Shinto religion, this act formed a bond between the artist and the water, where a monk could learn from the water’s spirit.

Nine hundred years or so later, Len creates Tsunaminagashi prints using oil pollution from neglected waterways. Down Newtown Creek, a superfund site between Brooklyn and Queens, Len floats in his jon boat. Scanning the surface crowded by lumpy mobs of detritus, he waits for the right moment before placing his paper, capturing the effects of the unkind hand of humanity on water.

A fly on the wall at one of Len’s exhibitions may observe a face pressed close to a print, the page climbing with abstract rivers of earthen color. The viewer’s eyes follow the movement around the page, innocent and curious until they realize they are looking at metals, petroleum products, chlorinated solvents, even fecal matter—all piled in the waterways that run through their own backyard or under the highway they drive every day.

“There is a discovery of these invisible urban spaces that people live nearby and had never visited,” Len says. “Either they were willfully ignorant of them or just genuinely never really knew.” Metals and concrete dominate cities, but the natural world is still there. Beneath our trash, it climbs through the cracks in the sidewalk or flows under bridges connecting neighborhoods. With more attention, these spaces could be uncovered, cared for, even enjoyed.

*****

Len’s longing and curiosity for his homeland carried him to Saigon, Vietnam. His head spun with ideas of what it would be like, fueled by the stories his mother had told him about his family, full of characters.

He stepped off the plane. “It dawned on me that I had never been around that many Vietnamese people before. Not having family there anymore, I just walked around endlessly, getting lost and finding myself at the same time.”

Eager to ride the Saigon River, Len boarded a boat and was immediately sobered at the levels of single-use plastic in the river. “I was used to NYC pollution, but this was a whole other level. It was heartbreaking to see my people, part of my heritage, living in a sea of garbage. It wasn’t like this when my family was there.”

Len sought answers, but complicating the issue of pollution in Vietnam is government hesitancy about citizen-sponsored cleanups, tons of imported American trash, and a desensitized public.

Len figures, “Humans are very adaptable, and all of a sudden your house is surrounded by trash, and that is the way it is.”

To reintroduce the people of Saigon to their garbage, Len printed the pollution of the Saigon River and the canals of the city. Watching him in the water, locals would express interest in fixing the overflow of waste. The day after the opening of his exhibition, titled Water Is Life, 60 tons of fish surfaced atop the river, dead. Testing identified the cause as pollutants and toxic gas washed into the waterway by rain. Yet the locals Len talked to seemed unphased. Floored by the public’s apathy to such a massive killing, Len talked about it anywhere he could, including sneaking it into a local news broadcast about his exhibition.  

“You can’t unsee stuff. Once you start looking, you can’t stop.”

This is the crux of Len’s work, his aim in making garbage art. Since I first crossed paths with him, I cannot look at a piece of trash without thinking about the journey it will take beyond the garbage can I have placed it in. In which “away” will it find its final resting place?

“People email me photographs of garbage, and say, ‘Thinking of you.’” Len laughs, but it is what he wants. “It’s about changing people’s perception. If I can plant a seed, and it can later grow into a bigger idea, someone’s own art project or a garbage cleanup, that to me is success.”

Len runs an informal waste study project, called the Privy Pit, where people complete various artistic prompts surrounding their own trash—from making costumes out of trash to learning how an object was made before throwing it away.

“The systems we live in are real, but it doesn’t absolve you,” Len likes to say.

Len’s words echo through my head often, reminding me of my ability to choose. He has inspired me to take more responsibility for my own consumption, to dig into how things are made, and to avoid unnecessary convenience when I can.

Yet he encourages us to consider our ugly habits with humor, with positivity, with art and beauty, in hopes of inspiring us to remember we are one part of a whole network of earthly inhabitants.

“Art need not just be pretty things for pretty people,” he reminds us. “Seeing and sharing that strange beauty in the ignored and mundane is a gesture for the world.”

Addie Foley is a writing intern at the Center of Folklife and Cultural Heritage and a student at Bennington College, studying agriculture and visual art. She plans to learn more from sTo Len, in hopes of designing community projects of her own in the near future.