A Burnt Apple, 2025
Approx. 3.5 x 3.5 x 3.5 inches
Burnt Apples, 2025
Dimension varies
Apple Market, 2025
A still image from a video
Dimension varies
Yang SoonYeal
Forbidden Fruits
May 19 – June 30, 2026
WATCH THE VIDEOS
JENNIFER BAAHNG’s curatorial initiative WE ARE THE LAND presents Forbidden Fruits, which explores the complex relationship between human actions and the physical environment through Yang SoonYeal’s burnt apples collected after a 2025 wildfire in South Korea. The online exhibition illustrates ecological and domestic destruction, revealing how human actions scar the land. Forbidden Fruits is a social sculpture, a transformative artistic concept coined by Joseph Beuys in the 1970s, which proposes that society itself is a collective artwork shaped by individuals’ creativity, actions, and thoughts. “Everyone is an artist,” in structuring society, fostering dialogue, and enacting social change. Showcasing charred apples as art shifts the focus from the aesthetic perfection of traditional fruit paintings to the messy, often overlooked processes of change and loss. Forbidden Fruits is a living sculpture, a Gesamtkunstwerk that focuses on transformation, transience, and the imperfections of reality.
In the humanities and visual culture, the apple shifted from a strict scriptural code to a dynamic vector for formalist, phenomenological, and semiotic experimentation. Originally bound to a Latin philological pun (malus denoting both fruit and evil), the motif long cast the apple as a rigid biblical archetype of original sin. Modernism, however, dismantled this theological shorthand to interrogate human consciousness and perception. Within still-life painting, the apple became a primary laboratory for radical innovation: Cézanne deployed the fruit to shatter Renaissance perspective, introducing a multi-perspectival geometry that undergirded Cubism. Van Gogh subsequently leveraged the motif to exploit simultaneous contrast, privileging visceral, chromatic expressionism over mimesis. Inverting this painterly lineage, Magritte engineered an aesthetic disruption that exposed the semiotic instability of the visual image. By decoupling the signifier from the signified, Magritte’s deadpan treatment bypassed traditional aesthetics, forging the intellectual matrix that codified Conceptual art and the mass-media ironies of Pop art.
Extending this trajectory from the gallery wall into contemporary eco-discourse, introducing Forbidden Fruits into Land Art offers a profound thermodynamic critique of the Anthropocene, staging an intellectual convergence among history, culture, and the physics of ecological ruin. By subjecting the apple to the entropic violence of fire, Land artists perform a literal and symbolic decolonization of the landscape. The blackened apples function as a site-specific archive of pyrocene trauma, in which the orchard’s domestic comforts are violently reclaimed by elemental, unruly natural forces. Structured within the landscape, these carbonized spheres evoke the geological minimalism of Robert Smithson and the ephemeral cyclicality of Andy Goldsworthy, serving as a visceral memento mori. This practice establishes a compelling material dialectic: the scorched apple is both a relic of total destruction and an essential biological nutrient that fuels future micro-ecosystems. Ultimately, this framework redefines the burnt apple from a passive object of aesthetic decay into an active, political agent of generative ruin, exposing the fragile, porous boundaries between human cultivation, climate-induced collaps
WE ARE THE LAND: Forbidden Fruits bridges material alchemy, classical mythology, and contemporary socio-ecological collapse. Yang SoonYeal’s practice orchestrates an ultimate semiotic rupture by upending the apple’s historic iconography as the fruit of paradise, refracting it instead through the lens of environmental destruction. As a living monument to the Pyrocene, these carbonized spheres crystallize the literal memory of climate trauma. The burnt apples are conceptually diamondized into hardened, permanent sculptures—simultaneously beautiful and horrific—that transmute an ephemeral eco-catastrophe into a haunting, static aesthetic object. Operating as a Beuysian social sculpture, Forbidden Fruits fosters active ecological literacy by linking anthropogenic action directly to systemic planetary health. Foraging among these contemporary ruins, Yang laments the collapse of a stable Holocene world while seeking a persistent impulse within the ash, the green buds of an Earth sprouting from the site of its own destruction.
ARTIST
Yang SoonYeal