(New York, NY) In Ming Bai’s solo exhibition 1001 Bottles and cans, every object is both painfully ordinary and profoundly allegorical: a street-castoff container, timestamped and sealed, reverberates as currency, archive, and elegy. Over the span of 120 days in the summer and fall of 2022, Bai picked up precisely 1001 bottles and cans around the Lower East Side streets in New York City, where refuse and renewal endlessly collide.
The entire corpus is meticulously numbered, bagged, and preserved. The act of collection generates a ledger: daily tallies, productive days of thirty bottles, absences marked as zero, the statistical mundanity of labor. The final redemption value of the project amounts to $50.05—the meager equivalence of thousands of steps, countless glances downward, countless gestures of bending, reaching, sealing.
But Bai’s bottles do not seek to be redeemed. They refuse liquidation, insisting instead on remaining as an archive of embodied time. Each bagged fragment testifies to the intensification of precarious labor under conditions of inflation, pandemic fallout, and rising costs of survival. Each is also a metonym of a paternal inheritance: Bai’s father, Xinyao (1954–2018), once a machinist in Harbin’s heavy industries, later a handyman and an informal recycler, persistently gathered bottles for spare cash throughout his life.
1001 Bottles and cans introduces dual scale and temporality: the macro-historical framework behind capital’s devaluation of labor, and the fleeting, particular time of a father who once pressed crisp 100-yuan bills into his daughter’s hand with the simple injunction, “Eat something good.” Like the silver bracelet and ring forged by Xinyao’s act of collecting, Bai’s sealed bottles alchemize the trivial into the memorial.
In its insistence on material form, 1001 Bottles and Cans recalls traditions of conceptual and durational art, yet it refuses the autonomy of the art object. Instead, it situates itself in the circulation of use and exchange: the bottle as waste, as cash-equivalent, as mnemonic relic. By repeating and preserving her father’s gestures, Bai re-stages familial memory as economic allegory, personal inheritance as social critique.
This exhibition emerges not as a nostalgia piece, but as a critical meditation on labor, value, and accumulation. It asks: What is the worth of work, when work is survival? How does love persist through economies that render both objects and people disposable? And what might it mean, in a moment of inflationary precarity, to collect not capital, but time itself?
Written by Rain Chan
Exhibition Dates
September 3 – September 9, 2025
Opening Reception
September 6, 2025 | 4 – 7 PM
Artist
Ming Bai
Venue
Sojourner Gallery
178 Bleecker Street 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10012
For more information, please visit
https://www.sojournergallery.com/current-exhibition/ming-bai-1001-bottles
About the Artist
Ming Bai is an artist and designer based in New York.
Her artistic practice unfolds in the interstices of her design career and after hours, extending into entrepreneurship, publishing, education, and nonprofit work. It engages with the physical world of people and objects, everyday traces, debates, and the discovery of small wonders and hidden values.
(text & photo courtesy of Sojourner Gallery)
