Endless Rain
Water, wood, plastic
50 x 768 x 144 in
127 x 1,951 x 366 cm
2012
Richard Humann • Endless Rain installed in Ulsan City, South Korea, 2012
Each year over 130,000 flights take off and land in South Korea. The world is truly a smaller place, in that people are traveling at an unprecedented rate, further and with more frequency than ever before. South Korea is both a macrocosm and a microcosm of this phenomenon. More people are traveling to and from Korea than ever in its history.
The concept of Endless Rain is that instead of rain falling from the clouds in the sky, it touches down, or falls from the planes that land every day throughout the country. Planes travel across the world, much like the clouds do. They cross all continents, countries, oceans and seas and drop down on far away locations. Clouds gather moisture and are formed from many sources of water, and later drop that water back on locations far, far away.
Hundreds of plastic bottles were sent from people in countries from all over the world. By having the water taken from many local sources and shipped to South Korea, specifically Ulsan City, helps to demonstrate that we are in fact a very small world that shares our natural resource of water. Polluted water in one city spreads to many cities, and then to many countries, and then to everywhere. The world needs clean water to survive.
The dichotomous side of the piece though, is that much technology and industry is applied to get the water to Ulsan City. Plastic manufacturers create the bottles, trucks carry them to and from the airport, and planes carry them back and forth to many countries. It is somewhere in the middle of this equation that we must look to balance industry and nature or growth and conservation.
The bottles of water that are placed on the pedestal at the exhibition site, creates a river of fresh water—not just a river of Ulsan City, but a river of the entire world.
Richard Humann • Endless Rain installed in Ulsan City, South Korea, 2012
Photo credits: Koh Myung Jin / Richard Humann Studio